It’s Awesome for a Reason
The Awesome Bar is a paradigm shift. Otherwise it is awesome. That is all.
Firefox 3 came out yesterday to much fanfare and a world record. The world seems to like it, at least in general, though I have heard a bit of complaining. One thing in particular: the Awesome Bar.
This has been the number one complaint I’ve heard, and to be fair, I can’t blame people. When I first downloaded a beta (or maybe a nightly) back in January, I HATED the Awesome Bar. I spent a couple hours with it and bitched to Rob (who was and still is an intern). I just wanted URLs to be matched as they always had been, with the first few letters and then a bunch of arrow pressing as I chose the right page. By the end of those hours I was frustrated as all hell and wanted out. Rob told me about the oldbar extension – which makes the Awesome Bar behave much like the old location bar – and installed it. I used Firefox & Safari roughly equally over the next couple weeks, and then I interviewed with Mozilla.
During one of my interviews (with Mike Connor I believe), I was asked, “If you could change one thing about Firefox, what would it be?” I thought about it a second, and the first thing that came to mind was my new found hatred of the Awesome Bar, so I said that. I explained myself, and said some of the things that I said to Rob. My biggest gripe was that I just wanted URLs to be matched before titles of pages. Mike talked a bit about how it worked and how it used machine learning to adapt to how I used it. So if I just behaved like I used to and chose the page I was looking for, it would remember that for next time. He said it was still being tweaked and it wasn’t perfect yet, but that I really should give it another shot.
So I did, and since I knew a little bit more about it, I felt a little less apprehensive about using it. So I set out to “train” it. I bit the bullet and got some inaccurate results over the next week or two. At one point in there I opened my browser and could not for the life of me think of the domain or URL for a page I knew I had been to a couple days before. I did however know what the page was about (it was something specific about Java or some such nonsense for an assignment). So I just typed the topic into the Awesome Bar. Luckily the word I was thinking had been in the page title, and viola voilà – the first result after I had typed the word was the exact page I was looking for. It had proved itself to me. I probably would have spent another 20 minutes trying to remember exactly what I searched for on Google. I’ve been using it since and absolutely love it.
So just give it a shot and quit complaining. Yes, it is a complete paradigm shift. But it’s not called the Awesome Bar for nothing; it really is awesome once you give it a chance.
Comments
Hmm…. so I can either put up with something I don’t like for a week and get some unspecified “awesomeness”, or I can download an add-on and surf the way I want to.
Tough choice. I’ll go with “simplicity and not having to teach a machine”, thanks. And by the way, STFU about telling me to STFU.
Dan, I appreciate the comment, but not the tone.
I can understand being frustrated with how the new location bar works. That is in fact the point of this article. All I’m saying is that people need give it a try before writing it off as a failure. I said the same thing as you. And if you still don’t like it after trying it, fine go with the extension.
Well, I’m not Dan. I use IE and Firefox on a few different machines, with regularity. I have Oldbar on one Firefox machine, and the Smart Location Bar unmodified on the rest. Either way, my issue isn’t so much with the presentation (which is too garish, but easily modified) – it’s with the algorithm.
I have used the Smart Location Bar now for almost 6 months. I still find it sluggish and non-helpful, and I cringe often time I type the start of a URL, down arrow, and end up at the exact same wrong URL as I’ve been tricked into selecting over and over again. Ya, it learns from you, but it doesn’t make a distinction between where you went where you wanted and where you went where it thought you wanted to go.
Basically, my mind remembers URLs. My optimal algorithm would be:
starts-with match on strings of the HOST Results ordered by URI-STEM length (shortest first) Results for matching URI-STEM length ordered by URI-QUERY length (shortest first)
Throw in some frecency, if it’s nice and lightweight, but for the love of all things that are tasty, give a boost to those short URLs!
Mebbe some day I’ll get around to diving into the code and doing this for myself. But Firefox will continue to be inefficient to me as long as the Smart Location Bar spends CPU cycles and disk time searching through page titles, bookmark titles, URI-STEM and URI-QUERY for random keywords that I never bothered remembering.
I have used it since it came out and i still find that whole aweful bar useless. I gave it a fair chance (more than others did) and found that in fact it just doesnt work. It kind of reminds me of what one my first year professors said about programing (GIGO) which stands for garbage in garbage out. From what was stated in this article one would think that mozilla is trying to make us believe its an artificial intelligence. I have been following several sites and discussions about firefox and the majority thinks the aweful bar is a mistake. (perhaps a coding error) For myself i used firefox 1x and 2x and loved both of those. Since the 3x versions i have noticed that my time to completion of projects has greatly increased and my boss is getting displeased with me. Last board meeting i suggested we change our policy in which browser we used and 7 of the 8 programmers agreed citing that work flow had decreased in several areas because the browser did not preform as well as the 1x and 2x ones did. For now i am going to use one the older versions of netscape until i find a better suited one for my work. Good luck with your aweful bar. Hope firefox one day gets back to listening to the community for they are your most valued asset.