That said, Firefox 3.5 allows one to VERY easily disable the awesomebar: Preferences -> Privacy -> Location Bar.
Their arrogance of baking into the browser what is essentially a bundled extension was ridiculously annoying. My favorite added misfeature: it blacklists URLs with the 'about' protocol handler.
I had been disabling / detuning it piecemeal with extensions + settings to make it less obnoxious. I've come to like most of the completion features most of the time, but the visual presentation and interactive behavior is just fucking awful.
At least it's not as bad as Epiphany: it sorts only in direct chronological order (oldest first!), and in true GNOME style is not customizable in any way. Why the fuck would you ever want that?
What is correctly shown? It shouldn’t be shown as a tooltip as that leads people to write alt text that’s specifically useful as a tooltip and useless to the real consumers of alt text: screen reader users and search engines.
Resolved in 3.0, but was outstanding for many years. The bug comments are worth reading (some of them are from the XKCD and Dinosaur Comics guys, whose sites this bug impacted fairly heavily). It doesn't make their dev community look like a place I'd want to be.