Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart

While I agree that there should be a way to disable the awesome bar, it's worth nothing that it does take some training and getting used to.

The awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful.

I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I considered going back to FF2. For example, I used to always type "en." to find a wikipedia page, but that no longer worked well. Now I love being able to type in parts of pages, and I no longer use bookmarks since I can just search my entire history. The only thing missing is the ability to sync the history and awesome bar training to other machines, which we're working on ( http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ ).

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla :)

I like that Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around. I'm just wondering what the rationale behind not allowing the previous way to be used is. Don't suppose you know or have an inkling?

My problem with "awesomebar" is that while it does bring up the sites I visit often (which FF2 did, and given they're a small number of social/news sites; /., reddit, hn, facebook, nytimes, etc its not exactly difficult to list), the order they're listed gets mixed up every time I try to visit a site.

reddit.com showing up ahead of news.ycombinator.com when typing "news" for example doesn't make me like this new way of figuring out what URL to go to (guessing randomly? I'm sure there's an algorithm behind it but after using it since RC1, it still looks random to me) what URL I want when I'm typing the URL in the URL bar.

I'd like to point out that Opera 9.5 alpha had this feature before "Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around."

Definitely. I've been using it for the past month or so and have no idea why everyone is making such a big deal out of this.

At first it was a little messy but I've gotten used to it so it's fine by me.

Didn't know that. I haven't used (and dont plan on using) Opera. It's not a bad browser, just not my cup of tea.

Well, it may sound strange and counter-intuitive, but when I am typing something in the address bar, I am typing a URL. Not searching God knows what in God knows where. I know that in FF3 I could be, but that's not what I am used to. So all non-URL stuff that smartbar throws at me is just a noise that I have to filter out.

As I said above - the transition logic for FF2/IE/etc users was not thought through AT ALL.

Given it's a smart bar, I expect it to be more flexible in its configuration, so that I could adjust its smarts as needed. E.g. it could have configurable weights that control how important a match in particular piece of data is. This way I would've zero'ed the importance of everything, but the matches at the head of the URL and happily went about my business without ranting :)

Again, this sort of flexibility is not a hard thing to implement nor does it pollute or burden the UI in any way. Why this or something similar didn't make it into a production release is beyond me.

I actually like it quite a bit.

There are probably a bunch of people like me who have grown quite accustomed to using the Firefox address bar as a quick way to do a Google i'm feeling lucky search. For me, as an FF2 user, this fits quite perfectly with that pattern of usage, and actually extends it conveniently.

Like you I do get tripped up when I try to type a straight URL in there though. Maybe if they raised the awesomeness level a tad they could do some basic pattern matching to recognize when an explicit URL is being typed there. Until then it's just a "cool" bar in my book.

I don't see your problem: you can still "just type your URL", can't you?

His problem is that he has to go through a lot more effort because under FF2, etc., he only had to type a few letters from the beginning of the URL in order to get where he was going.

This is still the case: typing in 'news.' will be recognized as a URL, and only subdomains of 'news' will be matched.

No it's not, it searches entire URLs, names, etc. So site.com/news will come up as well. I found the "awesome bar" entirely un-awesome as well.

No, it won't with the trailing '.' -- try it yourself, visit site.com/news and then search for 'news.'

But then you have to have the full domain, which is shitty. Defeats the purpose of having it search at all.

What happens when you type in "ycomb" instead? Since it is search, that should come up with news.ycombinator.com, not any old web address that starts with news...

"... Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful. ..."

Not really.

It looks like I submit more than I read. So the "awesome" bar puts "submit" before the "index" page. Counter intuitive to what I really want, the index page where if I have to I can add /submit. It just means I now look at line 2 if I want to read.

For what it's worth, I found it immediately intuitive, and thought it was a great design feature. I hope many others do too.

I did not really notice it, too. Only when I read that complaint.

Me too - I used to dislike it, even installed the oldbar extension to disable it. Now though, I find it pretty useful: to get to HN, I can type just 'h'; to get to the Arc forum, I can just type an 'a'; It's saved me a many Google search, too, because I tend to remember webpage titles much better than their URLs for most things.

As someone mentioned above, it learns your habits. It irritated me at first, as any fairly major feature change would, but it is pretty awesome and useful.

When I find that I visit a site so often that I habitually key in the first few characters, hit down, and hit enter, it is time to bookmark it and give it a keyword (in a bookmark's properties). After doing so, (as an example) if I go to the bar and type 'hn' and hit enter, it automatically takes me to http://news.ycombinator.com/. I think using this feature would benefit you, and maybe ease your hatred to mild distaste, and, just maybe, eventually you'll even _like_ the Awesome Bar.

I wish you luck.

When I find that I visit a site that often, I subscribe to the rss feed. I use keywords for searches: / for google, m-w for merriam-webster, and so on.

I use http://yubnub.org in the Firefox search bar for that. It has commands for nearly every search you could imagine. I'm a bit of a command-line-geek, so that likely factors into its appeal for me.

To be fair, there is an obvious benefit to being able to search titles and bookmarks. I've been using the betas (and nightly builds) for quite some time, and it's stopped getting in my way. I do believe that the default behaviors were not thought through very well (strings at the beginning of a url should have higher precedence than page titles), it does take up too much space, and it takes too long to show up. It also tends to interfere with autofill.

I agree that when you start using it you hate it, but I've grown to love it. It's one of those little learning curves, and you learn to start typing what you mean instead of a cryptic URL. I think this is one of those things that "normal" users will love because it matches how they think. And us techy folks will learn to love it because it really does make more sense.

Completely agree, I can't stand it. That combined with the fact that (in the Windows theme at least) the drop down on the back button is now in the wrong place are two pretty random changes that are exceedingly irritating.

Without reading up on it, I'd guess the SmartBar is an attempt towards trying to address the fact that "a lot of" [1] people don't distinguish or understand the differences between the address bar, a search box in the chrome, and whatever largish text box is at the top of their home page. That doesn't mean I don't hate it though.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/27/1160055...

Be careful-- the next thing you know, in FF4, the smartbar will be the "Google-as-you-type-suggestion-bar".

Good points. I've been using FF3 since alphas and have gotten used to the "smart bar". (I didn't even know it was called that until today.)

I tend to agree though. I'm still being driven nuts that Google's favicon has changed. I think companies need to be sensitive to all the momentum that people bring to their products.

But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.

This might have been one of those things that might have worked better as an add-on. I think it might have been kinda slick when you first fire up FF3 to be presented with a choice of basic add-ons to play with, like "Smart Bar".

People only want to learn one thing. If there's a default way, and an optional way, most people will use the default, so you'll be able to expect it and learn it. If, however, everyone is forced to choose at the beginning (without a default), there will be a pretty even distribution of people with and without the feature enabled. In a case where this severely affects the usability of the browser for those who aren't used to it (e.g. those who expect to be able to use the beginnings of URLs in the smart bar and can't, and, vice versa, those who expect to use keywords in the "old bar" and can't), this causes problems.

For example, say you wanted to set up computers for public use at a school or library. Which way is it better to set the option? If it were a default/option pair, it would obviously be better to set it to the default, since people would be more familiar with it. If, however, it were just two equally valid options, which one would people be more likely to be familiar with? Multiply this by every possible [add-on on/add-on off] pair, and you have, perhaps, 1000 or more default browser configurations, any of which are equally likely to run into in the wild!

Anyway, on your first point, I think users need to be a little more sensitive to the fact that, if they don't allow themselves to be pushed out of their comfort zone every once in a while, their experience using their software (or anything for that matter) will never improve. If a feature worked crappily, one would never know it until they adapt to the "new way" enough to see how bad it was before. Until then, their comfort with the old way makes them much too partial to be a good judge.

> But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.

That's the thing actually - supporting the old behavior in case of FF3 wunderbar is trivial as it's just a subset of the new behavior. Just restrict latter as this:

  (a) search for a match only among the URLs
  (b) match at the head of the URLs; skip "www." when matching if it's present

I'm not an FF dev, but this should hardly take more than a couple of hours of work, esp. if one is familiar with the code.

A Firefox extension to turn off the AwesomeBar has been out since February.

Oldbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

That only makes it look like FF2. It still uses the same annoying way of guessing what URL you want.

How is it annoying? Just unlearn the cryptic prefixes or urls, and type in what you really want.

Well, starting to type "news" when i want "news.ycombinator.com" and getting "reddit.com" or "digg.com" is kinda pointless. Unless you're suggesting that URL's are obsolete?

not at all, but why not start typing "yc..." or "redd" etc instead? Be specific.

Maybe my line of thought where a URL that only one website can own is outdated, but i thought that by typing the URL it would be more specific then, say, going to google and typing in "news" and hoping to find hn.

I've gotten (semi)-used to it now, but I wonder why they did not make it an option to switch between the new way and old way. Or at least, keep the current "look" but have an option for it to behave the old way.

  --> about:config
  --> set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0

This appears to work, but at the expense of removing the URLs you typed in the address bar. So I guess your point is still valid.

Personally, I think the Awesome Bar is fantastic.

Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.

And according to my IRC conversation with someone on #firefox # irc.mozilla.org earlier, Firefox 3.1 will have the option of having. They even have the patches all ready. So why it's not in Firefox 3 is beyond me.

> Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.

Yeah, which is why that setting is pretty much useless. Also, when setting that property to 0, it causes the screen to flicker intermittently when typing in the address bar (at least on Mac OS X Tiger).

I've never hand any of these problems, the awesome bar is brilliant. Sure I'm not entirely sure where the sites I use all the time are but that is what bookmarks and keywords are for. d for digg, s for slashdot, f for facebook. The awesome bar is brilliant as a tool for finding search results you are trying to get back to, you have search friendly URL's that are indexed quickly, I can navigate my web app if I remember any part of the URI. This will be a big call for search friendly URL's as identifying a page by the id number just won't hack it when I'm looking for something by subject. This is the biggest improvements from FF2 to FF3, just let it grow on you. The aesthetics here are following the function, this URL is easy to read.

Brilliant.

Sometimes there needs to be a hard break to what you're used to if it is simply a better interaction model. Firefox's smart bar is a definite improvement, although it takes adjusting to (like the Office 2007 ribbon, and the Vista start menu)

Not all of us want feature creep, and if we're doing something a crappy way, then I don't mind if I sometimes get dragged kicking and screaming to a better model. I eventually got used to opening my browser windows in tabs instead of new windows. I got used to Gmail compared to Eudora. It's hard to satisfy everyone, and if you can satisfy a lot more people with a hard change that upsets a few people, sometimes it is better.

I don't think the points you made are prerequisites for good UI design.

I understand the reaction, but I have to echo the other commenters who say they've "gotten used to it". This feature annoyed me for the first day or two I used it. Then I began to expect this behavior, and actually began to use it. Now I prefer it.

That's just me, though.

The awesome bar is less than awesome. Definitely sticking with FF2 here.

I think it is great. Bookmarks on FF always sucked really, really bad. With the ability to search them on the fly, I am almost happy (it is a hard problem, how to organize information).

Maybe it should be possible to disable it, but since I actually like it, I don't care...

You know about the bookmark keywords, right? I have set news.yc to keyword yc (in the properties of the bookmark), so when I type "yc", I go straight to this site. Maybe that feature could alleviate your pain?

What annoys me the MOST about the smartbar is that it doesn't always work. Example: I type in maps.google.com and hit enter. Nothing happens. I click the little green arrow. Nothing happens. I edit to include the http:// and still nothing happens. I have to search for google maps in the search box to get to the site. wtf?

Give it some time, I thought it strange at first but after a few days once it learned what I wanted most of the time it became very useful.

It takes some getting used to but once you wrap your brain around it and its quirks it's VERY useful, to me at least. Of course YMMV.

It learns while you use it, so the sites you like (news.ycombinator, news1130.com, etc) will get to the top the more you use them.

the super-wicked bar is a respectable addition. it works like just the all-hyped instant search technology (e.g. of google, copernic, etc.) by (instantly) finding any url (which includes descriptions) containing the relevant search phrase. it's super-wicked. and the greatest part is that it learns!

i could see why someone might want to disable it, but i find it supremely useful. i don't have to search through my history...the super-wicked bar does it automatically for it. it's like my whole history is instant-searchable in the url ("super-wicked") bar!

more and more software is continually making use of instant search technology (e.g. application launchers like Launchy), and it's a great thing indeed.

I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU! When I'm typing a url, let me see URLS! If I want to search, there is a search box immediately to the right. >_<

wat i hate happen is when i type in "p" it automatically goes to pornhub! m definitely not going to install ff3 in the computer down stairs.

Yes, someone on slashdot was complaining of this. He visited a pr0n site daily. Fine. However, now there's a good chance that site will flick by, two lines high, as he starts typing in the location bar before he gets too specific. He doesn't want to wipe his whole history, but nor does he want it appearing all the time. I can see his point. Just type `e' and the top match isn't specific to the very vague `e' but may be embarassing.