Firefox 3 AwesomeBar

[Ben Scott]

  Been trying Firefox 3 out on my 'nix box at home.  So far, seems
like an overall improvement.  Does seem faster, especially in the
history, and for some kinda of JavaScripty pages.  I think the icons
in the UI theme are a bit too uniform (thus hard to differentiate),
but that's no biggie.

  But I hate the root-fscking "AwesomeBar".

  For those who don't know, the location bar in Firefox 3 has been
"improved" to be a search engine with real-time feedback.  If I start
typing "gnh" to get, oh the GNHLUG website, like I would in Fx 2.0, it
instead does a full-text partial-word match on everything it can find:
URLs in history.  Page titles in history.  Bookmark URLs.  Bookmark
names.  I'm surprised it doesn't just grep my hard drive.

  To highlight just how stupid this is, say I'm an Everything2 noder
(I'm not, but say I am).  So I type "e" into my location bar,
expecting that to be my most used URL beginning with "e".  Instead, it
finds everything in my bookmarks and history that contains the letter
"e".  *Anywhere*.  wwww.ssssesssss.com?  That matches.  A page titled
"This thing sucks ssess a lot"?  That matches.

  Oh, and it takes up much more screen real-estate than the old one.
Much larger fonts, two lines per hit, extra graphics.  It favors
vertical space over horizontal space, which is especially odd given
the current trend towards wide-screen displays.

  Apparently, lots of people hate this thing, but the developers are
pulling a Microsoft and telling users they're wrong and the devs know
better.

  Anyhow, I haven't found a way to completely disable this abomination
yet, but the following goes a long way:

Install the "OldBar" Extension (16,000+ downloads and climbing!) to
change the "look" back to the old way:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Make the following about:config changes to get the "feel" closer to the old way:

browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped = True
browser.urlbar.matchBehavior = 2

-- Ben