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Comment by bkrausz | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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...

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.

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.

"... 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.

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.

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