Firefox 3 needs some browser.urlbar tweaks
After working with Firefox 3 for a little while now, I can safely say that I too loathe the Smart Location Bar. If you haven’t upgraded to FF3 yet, think of it as autocomplete and browsing history on steroids. And steroids are bad, kids. Stay away from them. That goes for you to Firefox.
Luckily most of the Smart Location Bar weirdness can be undone fairly easily. Here’s a short recap of my struggles for your entertainment ;)
Below in bold are the changes I made to get it to behave properly again. It’s not perfect but it’s a start.
Update: FF3 is beating me at this. After making the first set of changes (second image), I was initially happy with the URL bar’s behavior. But not anymore. For now, below are my new almost-back-to-square-one settings (in bold and high-lighted). I’ll continue tweaking and hunting for add-ons until I crack it. To be continued :-)
Update 2: Ok, I gave up the tweaking and simply installed the oldbar 1.2 add-on. Now my FF3 URL bar looks and behaves like it did in FF2. Lovely.
New
Old
The Hide Unvisited add-on is another way to wrestle back some of the control from Firefox when it comes to URL autocomplete.
Apart from the URL bar issues, I like FF3. Especially the overall speed and the improved memory management. And it still out-rocks both IE on ze PC and Safari and Opera on the Mac. Despite that it’ll probably take some time for me to get used to it. Will I learn to love the Smart Location Bar, or “Awesome Bar” as the FF people call it? You never know, but prooobably not.
Wim Leers
July 18
I don’t understand how FF3 is being faster than Safari on Mac OS X for you… are you using Safari 2 maybe?
Install even just the Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar extensions and FF3 is slow as molasses. Its GUI is also pretty buggy: try pressing CMD+L and entering an URL while it’s still starting and you’ll often end up with a nice all-white rectangle instead of a proper window.
Jaan
July 18
Hi Wim,
Thanks for the heads-up re the GUI issues, I’ll keep an eye out for them!
The noticeable speed improvement I see is between FF3 and FF2. I’m afraid I rarely use Safari and haven’t compared it to FF3.
I installed the Web Developer 1.1.6 add-on and at least for now it’s smooth sailing (fingers crossed).
Hope you get FF3 to work the way you want it too.