

The Firefox religion - aitoehigie
http://blakeross.com/2005/01/22/firefox-religion/

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m0nty
My only misgiving about this is the so-called "Awesome Bar" in Firefox 3,
which introduces a lot of visual clutter for only marginal benefits. Fine.
Maybe you _do_ know best. But I'd like to be able to switch it off (because I
just don't like it) without resorting to installing an extension. Focussing on
usability really should mean you let people decide for themselves what's
"awesome" and what's just clutter.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I love the awesomebar. For instance, I can just type in the bug number of the
bugzilla issue I'm working with currently (15592 for example.) And then hit
tab-enter and I'm at the right page. The learning algorithm took about a day
to stabilize but it works perfectly for me now.

If I'm trying to remember a page I browsed recently I type in a few keywords
and the bar will pop up a list of related pages. Usually the page I want to
review is the first in the list.

Give the bar a chance. I was leery at first but now I love it.

~~~
m0nty
"Give the bar a chance. I was leery at first but now I love it."

I thought (after I posted) that it might turn out to be like tabbed browsing,
which I first thought would be OK-ish but (like everyone else) I can't live
without it now. I just wish the awesome bar took up less real estate. The
visual clutter is appalling.

~~~
ashu
indeed. if they could get both url + title in a line (like gmail) that would
fix it's horrible visual looks. there's also the fact that sometimes my
computer is a bit too slow to lookup favicons for the links in the awesome bar
causing things to look even more horrible.

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msg
This is a three-year-old blog post. I'm not sure how much still applies to
current Firefox, especially the comparisons to other contemporary browsers.

That said, I often find Safari frustrating (cycle tabs with Cmd-Opt-arrows,
for example, does not always work), but I have to resign myself to its
foibles. To me, hitting the wall of the browser's functionality is what pulls
me out of the dream. At least Firefox is getting ongoing extensions and
patches.

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mark-t
I wholly agree with the principle here, but I often find myself running up
against firefox. For instance, there's this:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341067> . You'd think if that
many people find a behavior unintuitive or undesirable, the developers might
want to consider that there could be something to it. Of course, mom won't
ever run into this because she'd have to change a preference to encounter it.
It is possible to be _too_ focused on casual users.

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dougp
I have both opera and firefox open with default tool bars and opera is the
clear winner it wastes less space. You have to turn off FF's book mark tool
bar and then its a pixel for pixel tie pretty neat.

~~~
scorxn
One of the tricks I've learned with Firefox is that under View > Toolbars >
Customize... you can move the location of your "Bookmarks Toolbar Items" to
the right of the menu bar. Then hide your "Bookmarks Bar" and the customized
location remains. That way it doesn't take up an extra row of chrome.

~~~
dougp
I just turned it off all browsers have such great address completion I dont
have a need for quick access to bookmarks. I use all the browsers for diferent
things opera for general browsing, Firefox for js heavy sites, and Safari when
I am showing off my websites to clients because it looks the prettiest.

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bprater
In case you are curious, this is the guy that developed ParaKey, which was
apparently bought by Facebook.

~~~
apu
I would have thought that Blake is probably better known as creator and lead
dev of Firefox, rather than Parakey.

