Yeah, I recently stumbled across a tip about how to set the behavior back to the way it worked in Firefox 2 and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to. It’s made a big difference in how I get to things. Having shortcut keywords for sites I visit a lot seems superfluous now. If they add matching so the characters don’t have to be consecutive (like Quicksilver, Launchy, etc), that would make it damn near perfect.
— Tom 
Another feature that Mozilla browsers copy from Opera; this is a good thing in my book. But at that rate, it will be 2012 until I consider them ready for serious browsing business.
Screenshot: http://img177.imageshack.us/my.php?image=operaaddressbarze4.png
— Anonymous
Agree 100%. When they started talking about it I thought “that’s neat, I suppose…” Now I’m actually *using* it, it’s painful to have to use IE/FF2 for anything.
— David
Yeah, I just installed Beta 4 and I love it. I get places so much faster.
The flip side is that it makes it all the harder to hide your porn history but thems the breaks.
— Jack
A recent conversation in our office:
“Have you tried the AwesomeBar?”
“Yeah, it’s awesome!”
Maybe you had to be there.
I thought you were using Linux? So why a Windows laptop?
— Hub
And as a bonus, AwesomeBar looks nice, too. I have switched to 3.0b4 on my work windows laptop. No need to go back to 2.0 at this point. For my needs this is browser is very stable.
The first day I used the beta4 I thought the new bar sucked, by the second day I finally realized how it worked and loved it. Unfortunately, I downgraded to Firefox 2 because of all my extensions.
— Fábio
Hub asks:
“I thought you were using Linux? So why a Windows laptop?”
Because Mark hates freedom. ;) Or just maybe since it’s his work laptop running Windows that Mark is simply complying with a work mandated requirement to run a non free OS. Yeah, it happens sometimes, but real life intrudes into our carefully crafted idealized world. I wouldn’t fret that Mark has switched back to Windows or anything equally shocking.
silvarios: Given Mark works for Google, it wouldn’t be mandated per se. I can see him choosing to use Windows because of his work, which I’m guessing is a11y (on Windows) related.
— James
re Anonymous, comment #2: IE 5 for Mac had title matching across history and bookmarks in its location bar in 1998. I could dredge up a copy of 5.2.3 for Mac OS X to take a screenshot, but really, is anyone else going to care?
It looks annoying the first times you try it. It’s blazingly great the next.
— Sunny
Heh, personally I’ll stick with Opera. It already has that feature, minus the memory leaks ;) Seriously though, full text search isn’t such a bad way for people to find things. Personally I think I’d prefer it to be a separate input, the way search is currently handled in FF2.
#14, you clearly haven’t actually tried FF3 then, I haven’t noticed any memory leakage in 3 like there used to be in 2. I’ve currently got 17 tabs open and the browser’s been open all week on an XP machine, and it’s using just about 104 MB.
And the AwesomeBar is indeed awesome. There seemed to be a bug in b3 where it would pick the first guess off the list even when you were typing in a URL from scratch (i.e. you’d type a domain name and it would add all the rest of the URL without you selecting it) but I haven’t noticed that in the last few days.
— Julian
I’ve noticed with FF3 that Google applications seem to freeze up the browser, particularly the GMail/GReader combo.
— Duff
It’s difficult to believe that Opera trolling is still such a thriving industry in 2008.
– Chris
At best, the “awesome” bar is neutral. At worst, it gets in the way and is extremely annoying. I don’t know if you work for mozilla or just like shiny things, but usability wise the location bar is terrible and unsightly.
— J
It was ungainly at first because it was different. Now it turns out to really be awesome and it was more a matter of me being deadset in my ways.
— CR
About the the poor results for 1 or 2 letters typed, Beta 5 will match on word boundaries such as after a slash ‘/’ or dot ‘.’ which is useful for avoiding random matches in the middle of words.
Sites I’m visiting do not appear in the drop down results – the only thing I get after numerous visits to sites not bookmarked is the bookmark results until I type too many characters to get a match. The user should control the software and not the very opposite. If there is no option to switch off the awesomebar FF3 will not be my next browser for a long time.
— FGH