Browsers | redemption in a blog

One reason Firefox 3 is going to be awesome - Auto-completion in the Location Bar

March 22nd, 2008

After seriously giving Firefox 3 Beta 4 a try due to Safari 3.1 breaking the Shift key in Gmail (update: as kindly pointed out by some of my readers in the comments, it was Gmail that was broken, not Safari 3.1, doh), I’ve converted to using Firefox 3 Beta 4 as my primary browser. Before, I was using Firefox 2 as my main web browser, with a Safari window open for Gmail (because I tend to have around 50 tabs open in Firefox 2, and having Gmail among those tabs just kills Firefox 2’s performance). So yes, I was using Safari 3 as a “Gmail browser”, so to speak (in case you’d thought I’d defected from Firefox despite my history).

Anyway, enough with all that self-indulgent background - I’m writing this today to rave about how cool this one particular feature, auto-completion in the Location Bar (or the Address Bar, you know, where you type in URLs), in Firefox 3 is. Yes, you probably have already read about it and all the other neat new features and changes in Firefox 3, but I’d love to single out this one because it was the one thing I noticed that made browsing so much better when switching from Firefox 2.

So what is it? First, a screenshot of it in action:

Firefox 3 autocompletion in the Location Bar

Yup, typing into the Location Bar brings up a list of matched webpages from your browsing history. You can see from the screenshot that I entered “javascript” and it brought up not just URLs that started with “javascript” (which is the current Firefox 2 behavior), it also brought up URLs that contained “javascript” anywhere and even pages with titles containing “javascript”.

What’s the big deal? Well, one of the worst (”worst” being a relative adjective, relative to my opinion) things that can happen while looking for a page you once visited is forgetting its URL. If I’m lucky I can find it by bringing up the History sidebar in Firefox 2 and searching for it by some keyword or dredging through my browsing history.

In Firefox 3, I just need to type in some keywords related to the page and most likely it’d come up! Here’s how I start posting a new blog entry to this very blog:

Firefox 3 search history by title in Location Bar

No need to type “blog.c” and then selecting the correct page from the dropdown while remembering that the new post page is “post-new.php”. Less typing, no need to remember URLs. Just page titles and website names. If that isn’t useful for you, “you’re doing it wrong”. What’s more, Firefox 3 uses adaptive learning to keep an eye of what you’ve typed and what you select. After some time Firefox will learn from your choices and provide better suggestions in the autocomplete list. Sweet.

If you haven’t tried out Firefox 3 yet, go grab the latest beta. And then come back to this blog to get Firefox 2 and 3 running at the same time. I’m quite sure you’ll thank me for it (because this is not the only great feature in Firefox).

Update: Phil Wilson pointed to this extension for Firefox 2 that has the same auto-completion functionality.

Posted by Chu Yeow at March 22, 2008 SGT |

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Comments and TrackBacks (10) | Category: Browsers, Mozilla

Try the new Mac OS X UI for Firefox 3

November 20th, 2007

The Firefox 3 developers have been working on a visual refresh that integrates more tightly into the OS, and the Mac OS X version is looking pretty sweet. Well, public opinion varies greatly - from people who feel that it’s a rip off of Safari to those who really like the Brushed Metal look (myself included).

Well, if you wanna check out the proposed Mac OS X Firefox 3 UI for yourself, grab yourself a copy of Firefox 3 Beta 1 and go get the Proto theme.

Posted by Chu Yeow at November 20, 2007 SGT |

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Comments and TrackBacks (3) | Category: Browsers, Mac, Mozilla, Open Source

Best JavaScript library project roadmap I’ve seen

November 15th, 2007

The mootools developers look like they are having fun defining their project roadmap:

MooTools Plugin to uninstall Internet Explorer from any machine within network range

Posted by Chu Yeow at November 15, 2007 SGT |

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Comments and TrackBacks (2) | Category: Browsers, Fun, JavaScript

What’s new in Firefox 3: Pasting text into search bar to be 100% less annoying

September 27th, 2007

Now if you’re a regular user of Firefox, you’ve probably already had the opportunity to be dismayed by how you cannot copy and paste text with newlines into the search bar. All you end up with is the first line of text. I just end up typing in the search terms myself or copy and paste line by line.

Try it for yourself with the text here:

First line.
Second line.

Well, all that is gonna go away in Firefox 3, which replaces newlines with spaces. Small change perhaps, but definitely needed in this fanboy’s opinion.

Oh and it works for the Address bar too, only the newlines get removed instead of getting replaced with spaces. Could be useful for multi-line URLs which appear quite often in emails!

Posted by Chu Yeow at September 27, 2007 SGT |

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Comments and TrackBacks (3) | Category: Browsers, Mozilla

Smarter (and less-annoying) Password Manager in Firefox 3

September 7th, 2007

This is really nice: trunk builds of Firefox 3 since 1 Sept 2007 have a smarter Password Manager that asks you whether you want to save your passwords in a non-modal way. (The relevant enhancement ticket is replace modal pre-submit save password dialog with post-submit bar for those of you who want to read the bug report.)

Anyway, in simpler words (and some screenshots to follow), what this means is that whenever you login to a site that requires your password, Firefox will no longer wait for you to tell it whether it should remember your password. I bet this looks familiar:

Firefox 2 modal 'remember my password' dialog

Its usability is lacking because of 2 things:

if I entered the wrong password told Firefox to remember my password, I’d have to go to the Password Manager to delete it, and
Firefox doesn’t submit your login until you tell it what to do with your password, annoying for 2 reasons:
1. Sometimes I’m not sure if I entered the right password - but I’d be pretty sure of that if I get to the next page (i.e. if my login request was submitted).
2. It’s just plain faster if Firefox submitted the login and asked about my password together/later - blocking the submit is just a waste of time (i.e. a non-modal dialog would make more sense).

So, especially since I’ve used used Firefox for 156 hours at work since a month and a half ago (my most used application apparently), it’s pretty cool to find out that Firefox 3 will come with a non-modal “Remember my password” dialog. Here’s what it looks like: