Confusing Navigation Bar
The urlbar, as Firefox calls it in it’s internal configuration is no longer just a URL Bar. It lets you search within a URL, the titles of browser history and of course auto-completes the URLs previously visited. This is an excellent feature if you forgot the website you visited but remember the title of the page or what it was about. But for anything else it requires too much of mechanical effort for comfort.
We’ve been using address bars, navigation bars, urlbars on so many browsers, for so many years. Trying to re-invent something of this scale requires tremendous work and a little rethinking as well. After using this somewhat confusing navigation bar, I seem to enjoy using it. I usually type out the whole URL for websites I visit often even if it’s they are bookmarked or on my history so the new bar doesn’t really make a big difference to me. The auto-completion of URLs are prioritized depending on the number of times you’ve visited that page.
If for example, you type xabhishek and wait for it to complete itself, you wont be happy with the results if you’ve somehow visited a particular page on xabhishek.com more than the root URL itself. This is quite possible in case you’re tracking changes on the page of a website, something most of us do very often. I’m not sure this is a great thing, because I see most of the people at home complaining about this strange new address bar. Given the choice they would go back to using Firefox 2.0 which has better buttons and a neater design.
A few things that should be added along with the address bar is a triple-switch to choose between searching URLs, searching titles and auto-complete URLs. Either that or a combination of them that may be activated with 2 clicks(without having the user go and change browser settings and options).
On the transition to Firefox 3 looks just like a transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard would. I wouldn’t say Windows XP to Windows Vista like many others would, because Windows Vista is much much better than Windows XP, when you help meet it’s requirements.
Unrelated: While reading the WinSuperSite Firefox 3 review, I noticed how easily Safari was ridiculed. It’s probably not got the Windows-touch, looks more Mac-like but it is still has one of the most beautiful browsers I’ve seen on Windows.
The best thing about open source software is the amount of customization it offers (along with the fact that it is free and is spearheads competitiveness)
The awesomebar (as many call the urlbar these days) is confusing at start. I agree. Though I would say that it is one of the best things about the new release (which have been using way before the RC’s came out) The memory and speed boosts are really not that important for me. There are ways you can change things according to the way that you like. The various factors have different weights which can be changed and if you don’t like the default for any particular word say ‘xa’ just click press the arrow key to highlight it and press shif+delete. for ‘xa’ it won’t show it to you again. You can even turn the awesome bar off! Neater design eh? Download the grapple theme from the themes page on mozilla, works like a charm.
The addons were definitely the reason I shifted to FF but the the urlbar has made it almost impossible for me to shift back to Safari. There are things that I didn’t like earlier. I had changed my ‘Next Tab’ to (cmd+ right) as I prefer single handed shortcuts while browsing. FF didn’t let me change that. FF renders pages not as prettily as Safari does and FF doesn’t have the Mac feel to it. Though the above mentioned points are things that will probably see me not using Safari for some time I think
@Aditya: The Grapple theme is excellent. I don’t see any reason for Mozilla not making this the default theme. Yes, the extensions are excellent. But I don’t seem to use a lot of those simply because of how good these browsers are at blocking unnecessary stuff.
FF does not have a Windows feel to it either, because going by what you said it doesn’t work like Internet Explorer. But no, that’s not what I tried to say. We only talk about the interface, which could be tweaked, and with subsequent releases I do expect some big changes.