I’m a full-time Firefox user. It’s a truly great browser. It’s easy to use, pretty quick, and stable. At work, I very often end up with a single session running all week, chopping and changing tabs. I’ve got quite a few add-ons in there too. Some are quite trivial, and some do some pretty useful stuff.
Firefox 3 added quite a few new features, one of which is the AwesomeBar. I don’t think that’s the official name, but that’s what people are tending to call it.
It’s a suitable name though. By simply typing a term into the bar, it goes and searches your bookmarks, history, and typed address history, to find anything relevant. It also searches both the link address, and the title, and any other keywords you may have set.
Here I searched for something pretty simple – ‘sky’. It’s found places I’ve visited, like the Sky website, as well as a few links I went to which happen to have ‘sky’ in the title, like pages on the Digital Spy forums. Not only that, but it’s pulled up a link from my bookmarks (the one with the gold star). So useful!
In the past, the history drop-down was pretty much useless. In my case, it always seemed to show addresses to sites I’d visited about once, whilst the site I wanted was never there. I’d then end up digging around in the history, which was a futile effort in itself as searching it basically consisted of browsing down the list to see if you could find what you wanted. I never could.
My bookmarks were also similarly useless, as scrolling up and down them never really helped me find what I wanted. ‘Organising’ them never really works either, and when you get over a certain amount, it’s pointless trying anyway.
Now I can simply search, based on keywords, and even partial matches. I could type ‘sk’ and still turn up results, including ‘skiing’ – assuming I’d been to any skiing websites.
It’s fast too. It uses a database system to search through the data, rather than flailing around through files, so it’s quick getting to your data.
Possibly the best feature of Firefox 3.