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26 August 2008
Just got the prompt, and upgraded. . . . Anyone else do this?→[More:] The first thing I notice is that my dropdown browsing history seems to be a truncated hybrid of my bookmarks and actual sites I have gone to recently. Weird.
The change in the drop down box is what is preventing me from upgrading. For whatever reason, I use the address bar a lot to visit my primary sites. I tried out FF3 and then went back.
There are other ways to get rid of the, uh, smartbar, I believe they call it, but here's an easy one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
Oh, heck, that might not be exactly what you have in mind. Rather angry discussion here. AskMe kinda tackles it here and here. I opened about:config and then changed one of the browser.urlbar settings, but, alas, I don't remember which one it was. MaxRichResults to zero, maybe?
I looked into "oldbar" back when I tried FF3, but the disclaimer that it only changed the appearance without changing FF3's underlying algorithm scared me off. Eventually I'll just upgrade and deal with it. I'm procrastinating for now.
I upgraded a while ago - the address bar thing took a while to get used to, but now I would hate to lose it. I particularly like that it displays the page titles.
If I understand right, though, that OldBar extension changes the look but not the function--I think that a combination of OldBar and the about:config settings might be required to get that 2.x functionality back. That said, I haven't tried the extension, and so I could be totally making shit up.
(Honestly, though, I've started running Portable Firefox off my flash drive all the time, with settings optimized for speed and minimal writes and whatnot, with the history turned off entirely. It's not such a hardship to type metachat.org/recent, and ditching all that stuff seems to make the browser a whole lot quicker.)
I'm a veteran of the address-bar method, myself, but I love the FF3 approach. I use the "Most Visited" drop-down much more often than I expected to, as well.
Remember those first AJAX-y drop-downs, how fun it was to play with them, but they didn't seem very useful in the long run? This is an effective way to make them useful.
box: The actual name is the "Smart Location Bar". In fact, How to disable the Smart Location Bar is the second most popular article on the Mozilla Support page.
Yeah, I upgraded at work today, but my home machines are still running FF2, and probably will for awhile. The Smart Bar IS weird - Google Reader, for example, tends to fill up the bar with
* Google Reader (10)
* Google Reader (9)
* Google Reader (8)
etc. etc., which limits the functionality quite a bit. I need to dig in and tweak the settings a bit to get something that's more helpful.
That's a relief--I saw 'awesome bar' in a couple places, but felt sure it wasn't the official name.
Okay, so, if I understand right--the OldBar extension removes the two-line thing, but doesn't otherwise change the functionality? And changing browser.urlbar.MaxRichResults to -1 maintains autocomplete, but searches only from the beginning of urls, not all the text inside 'em?
If I recall correctly, FF 2.x's default was a dropdown list of one-line entries that included both typed and visited urls, and auto-completed based only on the beginning of the url. Is there any easy way to replicate that in 3.x?
The new style seems to be ticking off a lot of folks. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when the decision was made.
This all reminds me of the MS commercial wandering around the web about Mojave or whatever. The biggest reason I have not switched to Vista is because I just got XP working the way I want. (I may have stolen this sentiment from BP and something similar he said a few years ago.)
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