I actually like it quite a bit.
There are probably a bunch of people like me who have grown quite accustomed to using the Firefox address bar as a quick way to do a Google i'm feeling lucky search. For me, as an FF2 user, this fits quite perfectly with that pattern of usage, and actually extends it conveniently.
Like you I do get tripped up when I try to type a straight URL in there though. Maybe if they raised the awesomeness level a tad they could do some basic pattern matching to recognize when an explicit URL is being typed there. Until then it's just a "cool" bar in my book.
I don't see your problem: you can still "just type your URL", can't you?
Re:Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
by gambling8nt on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @08:15AM
(#220684)
His problem is that he has to go through a lot more effort because under FF2, etc., he only had to type a few letters from the beginning of the URL in order to get where he was going.
This is still the case: typing in 'news.' will be recognized as a URL, and only subdomains of 'news' will be matched.
No it's not, it searches entire URLs, names, etc. So site.com/news will come up as well. I found the "awesome bar" entirely un-awesome as well.
No, it won't with the trailing '.' -- try it yourself, visit site.com/news and then search for 'news.'
But then you have to have the full domain, which is shitty. Defeats the purpose of having it search at all.
As I said above - the transition logic for FF2/IE/etc users was not thought through AT ALL.
Given it's a smart bar, I expect it to be more flexible in its configuration, so that I could adjust its smarts as needed. E.g. it could have configurable weights that control how important a match in particular piece of data is. This way I would've zero'ed the importance of everything, but the matches at the head of the URL and happily went about my business without ranting :)
Again, this sort of flexibility is not a hard thing to implement nor does it pollute or burden the UI in any way. Why this or something similar didn't make it into a production release is beyond me.