The Awesome Bar

Okay. Now that Firefox 3 has been out for a while, and the comments around the net have died down, I would like to say a few things about the revamped Location Bar (AKA, the "Awesome Bar"). First of all, the Awesome Bar is very awesome. It knows about your bookmarks, search history, tags, the frequency and recency of each visit to a site, etc. And it magically optimizes its behavior based on the way you use the browser. In other words, the Awesome Bar can be trained. Since I only frequently visit a few web sites on any given day, I bookmark these sites (click the star), since the Awesome Bar seems to give preference to bookmarks. Also, if I clear my browser history, the bookmarks are still saved (thankfully), so the Awesome Bar becomes even more useful. In fact, I've only clicked on the `Bookmarks' menu approx. 4 times since I've used Firefox 3. The most commonly criticized aspect of the Awesome Bar is its "intrusive" nature and "lack of polish" as compared to the old Location Bar. I can understand what these people are saying, but I honestly don't care. I love the Awesome Bar for its functionality and adaptive-learning characteristics. I don't care how it looks. I don't find OpenOffice.org's UI very attractive, but I do find OOo to be incredibly reliable and simple to use. Mozilla, you rock! Firefox 3.5 is going to be even more amazing!