Aug 17, 2008

Mozilla Fixes Awesomebar In Next Firefox Version

I've been complaining about new "Awesomebar" in Firefox 3, which is the name for all the new functions in the location bar. To quote the Firefox help on the subject, "[t]ype something into the Location bar, and the autocomplete drop-down will show matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you have bookmarked and tagged." Awesomebar is also known as the Smart Location Bar.

I liked to use the Tools-Clear Private Data feature now and then in Firefox 2, because it cleans out the Location bar history. You can get it with Ctrl-Shift-Del. When I started using Firefox 3 it looked like it didn't work anymore. That's because bookmarks are not considered private data to be cleared. Even after you clear all the private data, if you then drop the location bar down there are still entries in it.

I wasn't the only one who found this confusing. Several bug reports turned up on Firefox Bugzilla site and a popular add-on for Firefox, Hide Unvisited 3, came out to turn off the tracking of bookmarks in the Awesomebar.

Now Mozilla has announced that they will add functionality equivalent to Hide Unvisited 3 to Firefox 3.1. The changes will be in the form of entries in about:config. The feature will be in Alpha 1 of 3.1, which should be out soon.

(full story)

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