Boosts Mozilla Firefox address bar with a little HD AwesomeBar

At the moment it is only an experimental extension for Firefox 4, but the latest development made ​​by the folks at Mozilla Labs I find very interesting. This is AwesomeBar HD and brings quite a number of improvements to consider for future versions of the browser.

According to Edward Lee said in the blog of Mozilla Labs, AwesomeBar HD is a spin-off of Home Dash and this is aimed at improving the user experience of the call address bar of Firefox. Without using any type of extension (as Omnibar ) Mozilla browser still kept two fields in the top of the screen, the AwesomeBar and search bar. The first change you will notice when you install the extension AwesomeBar HD is that these two will be unified and have a single address bar in other browsers.

Since that time we will be able to continue using the AwesomeBar as before, but this will have included a number of changes. By integrating with the search field from this we can perform searches for different services, the right of the bar will have several options: Go to the website will be the default, but if you type search: and then what we find is enabled the other options, among which is searching the web, Amazon, Maps, Reference, etc ...

Each of these options is configurable and can choose on the website on which we want to search. In searching the web we can choose between Google , Bing or Yahoo! , the map we can use the services of Google, Microsoft and MapQuest. And so with all the options, three for each type of search, which is already an improvement because previously we had only one choice search engine.

But having so many choices in HD AwesomeBar poses a problem if the resolution is that we work with is not very large and the web address where we are if it is, both texts can be walked on. Mozilla has fixed this in a very simple: shorten the URL of the website, so that only show the domain on which we and little else. The behavior in this sense also changes a bit, and click on any part of the address bar we will automatically remove the web page address where we are to allow us to start writing from scratch and copy the address if we have to put the mouse focus explicitly on this. Another thing to improve is that when we write part of an address for suggestions and we address not shown to us, which can be a nuisance to copy your address to share.

The proposal we make is very good, but it has to be worked yet. This new AwesomeBar still does not save the search we conduct, ie, when using the "operator" search: do not show us any suggestions of what we wanted in the past, as happens with web pages. This will probably be corrected in future versions, but more importantly, to use change search type we must use the mouse, with a small keyboard shortcut for changing the type of service that we seek to use AwesomeBar is the HD would be much faster.

Boosts Mozilla Firefox address bar with a little HD AwesomeBar written ALT1040 April 28, 2011 by David Blonde
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