Aza recently suggested a zero-configuration speed dial interface [azarask.in], so I started hacking on an add-on to do just that. After plenty of user feedback and reviews over the last couple days, you can get Auto Dial 4 [addons.mozilla.org] as a public add-on without needing to log in.

The add-on creates a page that fills up the screen with links to your frequently visited pages with the most frequently visited ones at the top being the easiest to click. As you go further down in the list, the links become smaller for the pages that you less frequently visit.

Quick access to frequently visited pages on new tabs (Ctrl/Cmd-T) (larger)

The Auto Dial page shows up every time you open a new tab. So after you hit Ctrl/Cmd-T, you can type into the Smart Location Bar as usual to search through your history as well as easily access your frequently visited pages with a click. With the Auto Dial page, you can click any of the pages like a normal link (middle-click or Ctrl/Cmd-click to open in a tab).

Other features in the current version include letting you to type the page’s number to jump right to it (hover over a link to see its number), moving selection with the keyboard and stripping off “http://” from URLs. There’s also a collection of about:config preferences to tweak to your liking: how many pages from the same site to have, how big the largest button should be, how fast the number of buttons grows, and how long you get to type the page number.

Auto Dial Add-on [addons.mozilla.org]

“.. adds incredible functionality. It’s like Active desktop for the browser.” “i love it! instantly my became my first useful home page” - Michael, zac

Thanks again for the feedback through email, my blog, IRC, and AMO.

Being able to read, write, organize, search mail in Gmail without ever having to touch the mouse is really convenient. I’ve even installed a Greasemonkey script, Modified Gmail Macros v. 2.0 [userscripts.org] that lets me label messages just by pressing “l” then typing part of the label.

Unfortunately, sometimes Gmail doesn’t know that you’re typing — keyboard commands all of a sudden stop working.

I’ve noticed this a lot recently when I use [alt]-[enter] to open a new tab from the location bar. This often happens when I’m reading a bugmail and want to see what a bug is, so I copy/paste the bug number and type “bug 395739″ into the location bar and hit [alt]-[enter] so that the keyword search opens the page in a new tab. After switching back to the Gmail tab, I can no longer press “u” to return to the message list; instead, find-as-you-type finds a random link containing “u”.

Adding labels to bug messages just by typing

So to address this issue, I’ve written a simple Greasemonkey script that fixes the problem that I’ve been running into. It even lets you hit [tab] from the location bar (to the search bar) to the web page and have keyboard commands working in Gmail.

If you have Greasemonkey [addons.mozilla.org] already installed, all you have to do is click the following link to install the fix:
Gmail Fix Focus [ed.agadak.net]

For those curious, the reason why this focus problem occurs is that when Firefox opens a page in a new tab, it decides to move focus from the location bar into the page. However, Gmail is made of a bunch of IFrames, so focusing the outermost-top page doesn’t send the keyboard presses to the right place.

Firefox 3’s Smart Location Bar learns to show you the page you want when you type in some search terms. In many cases, it already knows what you want when you type just a single letter. So for many people, going to a page is very efficient — only requiring 3 key strokes: typing the letter, pressing [down] or [tab], and hitting enter.

If you want to be even more efficient, take a look at Enter Selects [addons.mozilla.org]. This add-on gets rid of the middle step for you by automatically selecting the first result when you hit enter.

Pressing enter will select the first result

If you don’t want the first result to be selected, press [esc] or [left]/[right] to close the suggestions. However, if you’re typing in a URL or editing one from the suggestions, it’s smart enough to do what you want. You can even type in a domain like “ed.agadak.net” and not worry about it automatically selecting the first result.

“I install this on every instance of FF3 I get my hands on thus saving buckets of extraneous keystrokes a day.” “Wow this just makes the AwesomeBar so much more usable.” - danhorst, pacifika [addons.mozilla.org]

Quick update on my other add-ons. The functionality of Hide Unvisited, Edit Middle, and Show Keywords have made it in to the nightly versions of Firefox 3.1, so if you’ve already got those installed, you won’t need them for the next major release.

In the upcoming Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, there’s some new ways to change what shows up in the Smart Location Bar such as restricting results to show only your history (and not your unvisited bookmarks) or matching only in the URL instead of also in the title. Additionally, you can see your Smart Keywords queries show up in the drop down.

For Alpha 1, you can restrict the search to your history by typing “^”, or bookmarks with “*”, or tagged pages with “+”. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type “@”, and for title/tags only use “#”.

You can first start typing something you want to find like “mozilla”..

All results that match "mozilla"

Then realize that there’s too many results and you know it’s a page that you’ve tagged, so you restrict the results with “+”..

Restricting "mozilla" to tagged pages

Then continue narrowing the results by typing more words..

Quickly finding pages out of thousands

If you prefer the results to always restrict to history and match only in the URL, you can go to about:config and change the corresponding preferences to nothing (edit the value and delete the special character). This way you can always be only searching your visited history and not worry about matching in the title. If you’ve installed Hide Unvisited [ed.agadak.net], you can uninstall it and just change browser.urlbar.restrict.history to “” (nothing).

Preferences to change default restrict/match behavior

As with the Hide Unvisited add-on, restricting to history will only show pages that you have visited and are stored in your history. This means if you visit a bookmark, it will still show up even when restricting to history. However, you can select the entry from the location bar and hit Delete, or delete pages from the History Panel, or just Clear History to make them disappear.

If you don’t like the standard characters to enable restrict/match, you can modify the values from about:config to be whatever you want. They can be single characters, whole words, even words in other languages.

One last thing about Keywords is that you can now see what you’re going to search with a Smart Keyword Bookmark. You can even assign multiple bookmarks the same keyword so one can be the default Wikipedia search and another can use I’m Feeling Lucky [google.com]. You can uninstall Show Keywords [addons.mozilla.org] if you’re using that for Firefox 3.

Choose from multiple Smart Keyword Searches

A really useful AwesomeBar feature in Firefox 3 that works together with the one-click bookmarking is the ability to search for pages that you’ve bookmarked or tagged. Adding a star to a page effectively makes that page stay permanently in your history.

However, this is an unexpected behavior for some users who want the location bar to be completely empty after clearing browsing history. So to address that, I’ve made an add-on that hides pages (bookmarks) that you haven’t visited (since deleting or clearing history) from showing in the AwesomeBar.

Only visited pages (and bookmarks) are shown

Hide Unvisited [addons.mozilla.org] makes it so that you can visit websites, potentially those that you’ve bookmarked, and later open the History panel and delete individual pages or whole sites from your history to then have the bookmarked pages also disappear from the Smart Location Bar’s suggestions. Once you’ve visited a bookmarked page, it’ll appear in the suggestions like normal except there’ll be a star and tags if you’ve tagged it.

“This add-on is absolutely fantastic and does exactly what I wanted it to do and most likely what many others will want actually.” - Misa! [addons.mozilla.org]

Check out other add-ons I’ve written like Edit Middle [ed.agadak.net].

I’ve made a simple add-on to let you see results immediately when you fix typos or edit search terms in the location bar. The difference from what you get in Firefox 3 is that with this add-on, you’ll see results when editing in the middle.

For example, if you accidentally type “mozzilla” you can correct the typo to be “mozilla” and see the pages you were looking for right away. Or if you type “addons” but meant to type “add ons”. Or maybe you searched for “ginger carrot cake” [dria.org] and want to search for “orange carrot cake” instead.

Fixing “midle” typo to “middle” instantly shows results

Download Edit Middle [addons.mozilla.org] from the add-ons website or use the add-ons search from within Firefox 3. “Edit Middle” works for Firefox 3 including those using release candidates as well as nightly builds.

“Very helpful for those with less than 100% keyboard accuracy!” “Search relies on keyboard input and typos are a fact of life; this just makes the smart location bar that much smarter.” - bharuch2, Harlequin99 [addons.mozilla.org]

Thanks everyone who helped test, provided feedback, and reviewed my first add-on.