Posts Tagged firefox 3

Firefox 3 revisited

August 29, 2008 at 9:53 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged

Three months ago I expressed some reservations against Firefox 3 that was incorporated (in its beta stage) into Ubuntu. I’ve been using Firefox 3 since than anyway – because my reservations were not that serious – they were rather about principles not just to leave old things and let us choose, bla, bla… Thing is that:

  • If you want your address bar history to look “normal” again, you can achieve it via extension. I don’t care personally – hence I don’t use it.
  • If you want your address bar to behave like the old one I don’t know what to do – but I don’t care either because I got used to the new one.

After some time I found out when it’s good to use address bar. It’s much easier to find something from the history via address bar – just write something from the page title for instance. Many sites uses restfull page links for their articles hence it often works if the string is in the URL. If the address bar can’t find anything in the history it uses google – just fine. But with “awesome address bar” I’ve already found also pages that I forgot how to get to them. Great!

I don’t want to analyze how exactly it works – I knew it better when I didn’t want this feature. :-) Now it just works fine for me, I got used to check what is found in the history before confirming the page load and I don’t have any problem now with the fact that few letters find more than they used to in Firefox 2 and I have to type few more letters if I want exact URL (that is – in case I don’t have it in bookmarks). There is nothing missing from Firefox 2, there was no serious pain involved in adopting the Firefox 3 and I have to say that after some initial anger (little one ;-) ) Firefox is completely rehabilitated in my eyes and I’m even happy with its new history search. Howgh… next time it will be Firefox 4 probably. ;-)

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Firefox 3 – not better browser for me

May 25, 2008 at 11:14 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged , , ,

Firefox 3 in its beta made it into the fresh Ubuntu 8.04. And I experienced the same situation like in December 2006 – see my post for details. Of course the problems were not the same. Sad hero in this release is “awesome bar“. While I understand why it’s so great for many, I also understand many others who hate it. The reasons are quite simple really and one of the most important is – we can’t choose older bar with older behavior. Especially behavior is important for me, I don’t mind that the bar shows more although there are people who do – and for valid reasons.

In Firefox 2 I could get to my favorite pages very quickly. I’m sort of keyboard user and as such I can press Ctrl+L and write two letters with Enter faster than I move my hand to mouse. As a result of that I don’t use bookmarks very much although I have some on Bookmark bar of course. With new Firefox 3 I often hit completely different page after writing my always-working two letters – and that drives me crazy to say the least.

There is no option how to turn it off – not even in about:config page (if there is it must be something new and thank God for enlightening Firefox developers in the meantime). I can’t understand what’s so great on changing many things to “better” with no option to leave original behavior!

There is an extension that imitates original address bar, but the behavior is still “awesome”. I hope that Firefox 3 in final version will have both address bars – because bringing in only the new one is clearly a stupid idea. Address bar is *address* bar. I want to write URL there and I want only URLs to be suggested to me.

Best URL bar ever was invented years ago – in Galeon (maybe it wasn’t first browser with it, but it was the first time I saw it). When you pressed TAB to complete the URL, only the common part for all URLs from history was completed and you had to give a clue how you want to continue. So it worked like auto-completion from bash. Of course you could always use arrows to choose URL from history. That was something. It was the answer to URL bars where you often had to choose very long URL while you were interested only in its start (name of the site, not the precise article – for instance). No need to delete a lot of characters from the end of URL. Galeon is more or less dead now – but not because of the address bar – of that I’m sure. ;-)

Current Firefox 2 handles similar things well too. Although the completion isn’t “stop at the first ambiguous part and let me choose” at least it offers short site URLs first in the history. I don’t know if it’s based on URL length or it counts how often I wanted the main site… but it works nice. So please, please… don’t “fix” something that works. In Firefox 3 I have to watch carefully if the site I really want is selected and I need more to write letters to get to it. That’s not an enhancement – that’s a flaw. Howgh.

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