There are firefox extensions that turn it into a normal entry box, although personally I love the awesome bar. I can't switch to any other browser now because I hate having to type out the whole url all the time. I can just type "hac" in my toolbar to go to hacker news.

FYI, in IE8, typing "hac" in the url bar sends you to a google search on "hac". In Safari, you end up at http://hac.com.

Seconded. The awesomebar is one of the best Firefox features.

How does anyone actually tolerate the awesome bar? When it debuted, I thought it was some kind of prank.

I still kinda do.

You can also just type 'n' (if, like for me, HN is one of your most frequently visited sites).

I can already do this with Firefox 2.0 (Firefox 3.0 from the Ubuntu repository crashed for me when I installed a new version of Ubuntu so I had to downgrade Firefox).

You can turn autocomplete off or have it only complete history/bookmarks (I just upgraded and checked.)

This turns all completion off though, even URL prefix matching (as opposed to the awesomebar 'anywhere in the URL/page title matching'), which I'm guessing you don't want. There are some entries in about:config (browser.urlbar.match*) that might make it do what you want.

Safari 4 does some subset of the super-matching thing too now; I find it kind of a mixed bag (I end up autocompleting to HN/twitter way too often) but am slightly on the side of it being helpful, although more intentional history search would probably work just as well.

Would be nice if they could speed it up a little.

how is it shitty? I personally think its great, since you no longer need to remember urls, since it matches both urls and page titles.

I find that the awesome bar is increasingly awesome with more usage. I didn't like at all at first, but it really grew on me after a while.

As far as I know, there is no official plan to remove the "awesome bar".

Also, I can't until Ubiquity becomes standard. There's a disappointing lack of plugins for it at the moment, and standardization will really help that. :)