One of my favorite things about Firefox 3 is the speed. Or maybe the decrease in memory leaks…sorry memory fragmentation.
But the change that I have actually used the most is the new Smart Location Bar. This thing where you type the URLs:
Fascinating, right?
But there’s some serious power in there. I haven’t spent the time to do real research on how exactly it works, but it appears to search through your browsing history and can look for substrings in the URLs.
So how exactly can this help you. I’m a little bit of a “keep my hands off the mouse” nerd. I like to hit Ctrl+L to get into the location bar. Once there, I can begin my magic…well, use Firefox’s magic, at least.
3 Ways to Use Firefox 3’s Smart Location Bar
Find sites by searching for my user name. For example on Reddit, I am neat_stuff. On Digg, I am myneatstuff. If I type either of those names in the smart location bar, it will take me directly to my profile page on the corresponding site.
Find sites by words that were probably in the title. For example, earlier today I read an article about what happened at the Belmont Stakes. If I wanted to find it, I could start typing “horse”:
I picked “horse” instead of a probably more logical “Belmont” in this case to highlight something. “Horse” was not in the URL. It was in the title of the article. So this magic search bar is searching both URLs and article titles. Amazing.
Search more than one word at a time. This is truly my favorite feature so far. I run more blogs than I should. Each has an admin page. Instead of bookmarking them all and using the mouse to click on the bookmarks. I simply hit my Ctrl+L, type a word from the title of the blog, like “Webby” for this one, hit <space> and then type “admin”. Viola. My admin page:
So, that’s how I’m using the near Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar substring search feature so far. What tricks and tips have you found to use this new feature?
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By far, this is the best feature of Firefox 3, at least for me.
This is really stupid. When I click on the bar, i get ten sites that I haven’t been to in two years. I delete them and the next time i click I get 10 sites that i haven’t been to in three years. I just want the list of sites that I have recently been to. I don’t need three year old junk.
Don, it takes a bit to get used to and it seems to learn your preferences as you use it but if you find out you don’t like it, just turn it off or configure it:
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=es&comments_parentId=44238&forumId=1
it actually searches through your bookmarks too.
the way i use it is by sorting my bookmarks with keywords in each title.
for example. i add “univ” to the title of each bookmark relating to my university. so when i type “univ” i get:
1\ univ - Email
2\ univ - Student Portal
3\ univ - Resource Center
works great. i love it.
If I type in a word that it doesn’t recognise it uses a search engine that is not my current default (it was probably the last one I added).
I can’t find a way to configure it to use the one I want - simply removing the one that it’s using doesn’t do the trick. Any suggestions (other than re-adding the one that I want to use)?
PJatPoole,
I can help you with that but it will be better if I can write it as a new post which I will try to do this morning.
[...] I was asked in the comments of a recent post how to change the search engine that is used when you type something into the URL Bar (or Smart Bar)…. [...]