Firefox 3 beta 3 – URL precognition
At the time I’m testing the upcoming Firefox 3 both at home and at work. I’m pretty impressed by the performance improvements made by the development team, though one should still expect more variation in the performance to come. For one, Firefox at last moved to the Cairo graphics engine. Also the support of more svg elements is most exciting.. But all this will hopefully be part of a more advanced article I’m preparing to be finished when Firefox 3 is released.
In this article I only want to talk about the URL precognition (or rather autocomplete) abilities. Formerly Firefox would check for the beginning of an url and match against the urls in the history. For Firefox 2.x there was the very useful add-on “Autocomplete Manager” by UCLA-student Nikitas Liogkas.
Available features include:
- matching against bookmark addresses
- matching against page titles and bookmark names
- matching anywhere in the address, not just the beginning
- changing the sorting criterion to alphabetical by address or title, most frequently visited, most recently visited, or top-level pages first
- completing the best match inline
- temporarily or permanently disabling the suggestion popup
- excluding local pages and pages containing search results
- swapping the address and title columns on the suggestion popup
- highlighting the column where a match was found
- fine-tuning the popup appearance by hiding page titles, changing the number of visible suggestions, and setting the truncation method for long addresses and page titles
Firefox 3 supports most (if not all) of these autocomplete features plus it has the ability to match against tags of bookmarks. See, all bookmarks (Places) can have distinct tags to mark them in Firefox 3 so one possibility of finding a link is by typing a tag that could be associated with it!
One problem associated with autocomplete is the possibility of a misspelling occurring once and being dragged along from there on.. So, if you once accidentally typed “www.goooggle.de” you should be able to delete it from the autocomplete-list. Gina suggests hitting shift-delete to delete that item from the list, but i wasn’t able to reproduce this effect..
To change the maximum number of url suggestions provided by firefox you have to edit the configuration string ‘browser.urlbar.maxRichResults’ [via].
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Omar | 23. Februar 2008
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By Frank, 29. Februar 2008 @ 12:17
Hey Omar, I think you mixed up Thunderbird with Firefox in the headline, didn’t you? :)
By Omar, 1. März 2008 @ 08:47
You’re right of course. thanks..