Microsoft

Blogs

The Microsoft Blog

« Report: Ex-Microsoft legal chief to head SF Giants | Main | Microsoft considering alternative Yahoo deal »

'Awesome Bar': Firefox's next killer feature?

Representatives of Mozilla were in Seattle today to talk about the Firefox 3.0 browser in advance of its release next month. I sat down this morning to talk about Firefox and the browser market in general with Mozilla's Mike Beltzner, whose title is "phenomenologist," and Vlad Vukicevic, a Mozilla "infrastructuralist." (Give them points for creativity.)

One of the subjects we discussed was the Smart Location Bar -- a Firefox 3.0 feature known informally as the Awesome Bar. The feature gives the browser's address bar a mechanism for letting users quickly return to Web pages, without bookmarking them, even if they don't remember the address. As people type, the tool searches for that text in the addresses and titles of pages that they've visited previously. It also can search tags -- keywords that users associate with a particular page.

Here's what it looks like:

Beltzner made a pretty bold claim, saying that he thinks the approach is "going to be easily as popular as tabbed browsing."

I stopped him when he said that and pointed out the implications. After all, apart from the promise of better security, tabbed browsing was one of the main reasons that the original Firefox caught on, grabbing market share and putting a scare into Microsoft. Here's what Beltzner said:

I confidently predict that the Awesome Bar is going to change the way people navigate the Web, and I really wouldn't be at all surprised to see other browsers starting to do similar things. It's not just solving a problem that Firefox users have. It's solving a new problem on the Web -- that the Web has gotten so big, and revisitation is more popular than novel navigation. People go back to sites they've been to before much more than they go to new Web sites. Understanding how to simplify revisitation is a really big thing for the Web. It totally will change the way you browse.

The next version of Opera Software's browser, Opera 9.5, will include a feature called Quick Find that is similar in concept to Firefox 3.0's Awesome Bar, except that the Opera feature also searches the text on the page.

Beltzner said the Firefox developers played around with searching the full text of pages for the feature, but they found that to be too "noisy" -- bringing up too many pages that weren't relevant to what the user was trying to get. "We found that titles were generally a really good way of getting a lot of that metadata," he said.

On a related note, in a post this week on the Webware blog, Rafe Needleman analyzed some of the potential business implications of Firefox's souped-up address bar.

I'm writing a story for Monday's paper looking more broadly at the next Firefox version, and the state of the browser market generally, and I'll post a link to it when it's published.

From the Archives: For more background and perspective on Firefox, here's my July 2006 interview with its co-creator, Blake Ross.

Posted by at May 16, 2008 5:27 p.m.
Categories: Firefox, Internet Explorer

Comments

#129673

Posted by unregistered user at 5/16/08 9:56 p.m.

Awesome Bar is Awesome.

All hail the Awesome Bar!

Report violation

#129729

Posted by x-hiker at 5/17/08 8:25 a.m.

Not to worry, Microsoft's IE will have this feature in a year or two and it will probably work at least half as well!

Report violation

#129730

Posted by unregistered user at 5/17/08 8:28 a.m.

Dang it, x-hiker, you beat me to it! :-)

Report violation

#129772

Posted by TKing at 5/17/08 3:30 p.m.

Hmmm... thats it?

I really don't think that is a very big deal.

Report violation

#129800

Posted by Steve E. at 5/17/08 6:29 p.m.

THe IE version will make it frightenly easy for nefarious types to seze control of your computer. But don't worry, MS will come out with a fix only a year after the vulnerability is discovered. Unfortunately, it will require you to buy a new computer.

Report violation

#129844

Posted by Green Party at 5/18/08 6:00 a.m.

This is indeed a very useful feature. I've enjoyed it on Linux's Konqueror for three years now.

Report violation

#129849

Posted by Green Party at 5/18/08 7:46 a.m.

Bug #1 (liberation), first reported on 2004-08-20 by Mark Shuttleworth
Microsoft has a majority market share

Bug description
Tags: Kubuntu

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace.
This is a bug, which Kubuntu is designed to fix.

Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.

Steps to repeat:

1. Visit a local PC store.

What happens:
2. Observe that a majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.
3. Observe very few PCs with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed.

What should happen:
1. A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software like Kubuntu.
2. Kubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time passes.

Report violation

#142546

Posted by unregistered user at 6/23/08 2:21 a.m.

Firefox's next killer feature?
Yes it will surely kill FF to put spying options like this when everyone choses it because it is safer.
Yes it will certainly kill FF when they put "improvements" that don't even do what the previous version did
Yes it will certainly kill FF when they think they know better than me how I should surf and don't give a simple use it or not option.
Yes it will certainly kill FF when the solution they give on their support site is to completely disable the address bar

Report violation

#153646

Posted by unregistered user at 7/21/08 11:36 p.m.

I think Mozilla's Phenomenologist is completely right.

The Awesome Bar has definitely changed the way I browse the web every day. I now browse it with Safari.

Report violation

#171723

Posted by unregistered user at 8/28/08 3:06 p.m.

Awesome bar sucks! Anyone that cares about privacy will find it highly annoying. It takes up half the screen with bookmarks and useless information. I JUST want the ursl's I typed in to be remembered lke in FF2. Then, when I need to delete my private data DELETE it! How simple is that????? Not very hard to move mouse over 1 mm to the bookmarks section. I hope the developers are reading this because from my viewpoint the majority hate the awesome bar and it actually makes the dropdown useless. For those that "love" it let them install another crap tool bar that will satisfy them.

Report violation

! Login below to post a comment.

Unregistered users, sign up now

Or post anonymously (About this feature)

RSS
Headline widget

BLOGGER BIO

Joseph Tartakoff: P-I staff reporter

SUBMIT A TIP

E-mail or call 206-448-8221 with tips or ideas

FEATURED COMMENT

Q: Why can't Microsoft buy 'Coolness'? A: Because Coolness has a poison pill in its contract in the event of a Microsoft takeover.
-- Reader on Microsoft to sell line of "softwear"-labeled shirts