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.

I’ve continued to help Firefox users to get to the pages they want faster with features like multi-word search (just press space — great for matching titles) and adaptive learning (you’ll only need to type a single letter to get what you want). I even wrote an add-on that takes you to the top listed site by just pressing enter , so now you just need to type 1 letter, and hit enter, and you’re where you want to be (no need to press down first)!

So in Firefox 3.5, 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.

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.