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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

"the stupid URL bar that explodes into a list of sites whenever I type even a single letter there"

Um, that feature is brilliant, it's the only way I can still handle my bookmarks. Haven't tried Google Chrome, so I don't know if they have come up with a better solution. Have they?

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I love that bar, I don't even need to bookmark pages I visit a lot any more. All I need to do is type, say, "yc" and up pops this site. "tv" will show me tonight's TV listings. "gu" brings up the Guardian.

If I wanted to come back to this story, "yc firefox" would most likely bring me here and to any other HN stories I'd read with Firefox in the title. And so on. I didn't really like it when it was first brought in (change? no!) but it's grown on me.

i love it too. Another great advantage: you don't have to remember the exact url/domain name, which is getting difficult to spell these days.

Out of all the reasons a person could dislike Firefox 3, I never understood why this one is so important.

Because it reduces predictability at first. It used to be that I could predict what site would be at the top when I typed even a single letter, so I could triple-click, hit a letter, down-arrow, enter, and not have to actually parse what the dropdown list says. Safari (on my Mac, anyway) still has this property, except without the down-arrow, so it's even faster. With the "ultra-cool bar" or whatever it's called, I have to pay attention each and every time, which slows my browsing to the eight or ten sites I actually visit most, but which I don't bother to bookmark because I know exactly where they are.

All I need to do is type, say, "yc"

Why is this good? I type the letter "n" and news.ycombinator comes up. (I'm on ff 2.0). If I type "yc" I get this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

It's deterministic, being alphabetic, and superior in every way. I don't want the fricken address bar throwing dice on my input.

The key distinction being the ability to find the URLs that you don't know by fishing for the one piece you do remember, that may (inconveniently) not be until the end of the URL.

An example: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ which I inevitably reach by typing "big"; this was un-possible with the previous iterations.

Fair point, but if I type "n" I could well end up with news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com or any number of other sites I've been looking at. There aren't many sites with the "yc" combination of letters.

I believe the proper name for it is, in fact, the "awesome bar".

I still can't get used to the "stupid" URL bar (I'd call it too smart for my liking). It's a pity it is a pervasive trend amongst modern browsers. I have a copy of Opera 9.27 that doesn't yet have it, it's a pity it cannot render more and more sites properly.

Can I switch to the classic URL bar?

You can switch off the feature in the settings, afaik.

Actually the Opera 9.5 beta and Firefox 3 betas both started using a "Awesome Bar" type feature around the same time. Opera 9.27 was released over a year ago.

That's what I mean. I didn't like "Awesome Bar". I use the latest version of Opera that doesn't use it (and reluctantly use Firefox 3)

I believe Chrome does the same sort of thing, and it includes "Search for..." for the the tokens you have already entered.

Plus, chrome has the added advantage of not hanging when a js/flash intensive app is cranking away. So overall its faster.

Chrome sometimes decides that I have too many tabs open and none of them should render. Just as annoying. :(

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