Firefox 3 has been out for a while now. A while being six months. I have been a Firefox user for several years now. I would go into the reasons why but that would be a post on its own. One of the major changes I noticed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 was their alterations to the address bar which had been dubbed The Awesome Bar. At first I was not at all convinced of its awesomeness, mostly because old habits die hard. I was definitely in the habit of visiting sites by typing the URL in the address bar, clicking on my bookmarks, or, as a last resort, searching through my history if I only remembered part of a site’s address.

Thus, I was highly annoyed with Firefox 3 when I first started using it. If I started typing an address it did not always bring up the site I wanted. Say, if I wanted to visit echodrift I would start typing in echo… and it would bring up results for sites that had echo as part of the title or somewhere in the URL. That was not acceptable! When I typed echo I wanted to see results that started with echodrift.com! Not some article that I may have read weeks ago that had the page title as “Echo…” maybe echo wasn’t the best example. My point still stands: I did not like the Awesome Bar because I did not know how it functioned and had a totally different expectation of how an address bar should function.

After six months of use I don’t think I’d switch back for anything. I love the Awesome Bar. Now that I know how it works I can find sites I’ve visited before quickly and easily. I visit a lot of websites that I don’t bother to bookmark, such as flickr. However, I don’t normally want to visit flickr’s homepage. Instead I like to go and refresh the Explore page that brings up list of random images from the last 7 days. Because the Awesome Bar searches page titles, URLs, and other information I don’t have to type flickr.com/explore/… Instead I can just type interesting and have the link brought up immediately. This is just one of myriad of examples I could give.

The best part is it learns. One article I read referred to it as frecency, which is an algorithm that combines frequency and recency. The more you visit a site using specific keywords the farther up in the search results that site is listed. Recently visited sites are higher up on the list than others. Pretty awesome, huh?

There are many other features of the Awesome Bar that I haven’t discussed: search results show the site’s fave icon, page title, URL, if you’ve bookmarked the page and other things. The Awesome Bar can also search the tags you’ve added to your bookmark list.

If you use Firefox, what was your response to the Awesome Bar? If you don’t use Firefox… what browser do you use and why?