1) In Firefox 3.1, copy the following block of code and paste it into the “Code:” line in the Error Console (cmd-shift-J) then hit enter:

C=Components;d=C.classes['@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1'].getService(C.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection;for(o=[],c=97;c<123;c++){h=String.fromCharCode(c);q=d.createStatement('SELECT title t, url u FROM moz_inputhistory JOIN moz_places ON id=place_id WHERE input LIKE \''+h+'%\' ORDER BY use_count DESC LIMIT 1');if(q.step())o.push(['<b>',h,'</b>: <a href="',q.row.u,'">',q.row.t,'</a>'].join(''))}open('data:text/html,'+o.join('<br/>\n'))

2) View source to copy the generated html to put in your blog. (I’ve added emphasis for what I was trying to match.)

a: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
b: Bank of America | Home | Personal
c: Capital One Online Banking | Capital One Online Banking
d: Digg - All News, Videos, & Images
e: edilee
f: Firefox Builds • mozillaZine Forums
g: Video Game Cheats, Reviews, FAQs, Message Boards, and More - GameFAQs
h: Hulu - House
i: The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
j: Joystiq
k: Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide
l: The LLVMdev November 2008 Archive by thread
m: Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About
n: Gaming Discussion - NeoGAF
o: OrderStatus
p: Planet Mozilla
q: PhD Qualifying Examination | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
r: Google Reader
s: JavaScript Shell 1.4
t: tinderbox: Firefox
u: Gmail - Search results - edilee@gmail.com (unread)
v: Apple - Support - Discussions - New MacBook connected to external VGA …
w: Firefox3.1/StatusMeetings - MozillaWiki
x: xkcd - A Webcomic - Drapes
y: Bug 465076 – Yet another Ctrl+Tab / All Tabs design revision
z: Craig Zilles, Department of Computer Sciences

The pages listed here are those that I visit frequently, so it’s not the best way to see the word searching ability of the location bar; however, it’s interesting to see that all but one site matches on the title. It’s also neat to know that I only need to type a single letter and hit enter [addons.mozilla.org] to go to those sites.

I knew iPhoto supported 3-finger swipes to switch between pictures, so I figured I should file a bug so Firefox could do something similar to switch tabs. Lo and behold, there’s already a bug filed and resolved fixed since April! Three-finger navigation gestures on MacBook Pro trackpads should be recognized [bugzilla.mozilla.org]

Wait a minute.. that’s Camino! But it didn’t take long to find two related bugs: Core: widget/event-detection support for multi-touch trackpad gestures and Firefox: Implementation of Multi-Touch Gestures on Mac OS X [bugzilla.mozilla.org].

And even better is that both bugs have patches already reviewed or in the process of getting reviewed. The bugs were inactive for a few months, but Tom Dyas appeared out of nowhere (AFAICT) and started submitting patches with the help of Camino, Mac, DOM guys.

Earlier I took the Firefox patch and tweaked it slightly to conform better to sdwilsh style standards and added various refactoring. And now I’ve tossed those pair of patches up on the try-server so people can touch Firefox with a new set of gestures.

A quick detour for those not familiar with the multi-touch gestures.. The most basic multi-touch gesture is the 2-finger scroll which has been around for over 3 years (my iBook had it), and it lets you scroll through pages up/down/left/right/diagonally. Recently added is the 3-finger “swipe” where you place 3 fingers on the trackpad and move them in any direction like the 2-finger scroll. A couple other iPhone-inspired gestures are the “pinch” (2 fingers moving towards/away from each other) and the “twist” (2 fingers rotating).

Note! The following gestures are totally tentative and subject to change, and I’m not sure if they’ll even make it into Firefox 3.1. (From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!) You have been warned!

• Swipe Left: Go back in history [bonus! hold Cmd to open it in a tab]
• Swipe Right: Go forwards in history
• Swipe Up: Return to top of page
• Swipe Down: End of page
• Pinch Together: Zoom out
• Pinch Apart: Zoom in
• Twist Right: Next tab
• Twist Left: Previous tab

Personally, the biggest benefit is the ease of going to the very next tab with just the touchpad. No need to use keyboard shortcuts like cmd-alt-right or fn-ctrl-down or cmd-tab#. Rotating to the right doesn’t just go to the next tab because if you keep twisting right, you’ll go to the next one and the next one. You could think of it as turning a dial to pick the tab you want. And of course, turning the dial back in the same motion switches back to the previous tab.

So if all that sounds interesting and you want to try, make sure you have one of these machines before downloading:

• MacBook Pro from this year (either early-2008 model or the new late-2008 ones)
• MacBook Air (both models from 2008)
• MacBook from late 2008 (the new aluminum ones)

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 “pre” with Multi-Touch Gestures - OS X only [build.mozilla.org]
Edit: This feature has been in “trunk” since Oct. 23. Firefox 3.1 will have this feature, and the upcoming milestone, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, will have it. If you want to grab a version now, you can use a nightly build [ftp.mozilla.org].

Thanks again Tom Dyas for working on this feature!

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.

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.

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.

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

Typing multiple words and not being restricted to just matching at the beginning of the URL to match the domain provides a lot of power to the user.

I’ve put together some examples of how the Smart Location Bar can save you seconds, even minutes, every day when using websites like YouTube or Gmail or any place you can visit through Firefox. (Don’t miss the pro-tip at the end to easily read your new messages in Gmail! )

Ever visited a page but don’t remember the site’s URL or even the the domain? When you’re clicking through Google search results, you might find what you’re looking for but forget to make note of the URL. Many times you can just type in what you were searching for and Firefox can find it right away. Firefox will even order the results based on better matches.

Easily go back to pages without typing the domain

In most other browsers, you would have to start typing out “www.blizzard.com” if you remembered it and then additionally type “/diablo3″ to find the Diablo III related pages. Using Firefox 3’s Smart Location Bar, you could easily jump to what you want and perhaps find non-Blizzard pages that you might be interested in because you don’t have to remember to type the domain anymore.

A lot of pages on the Internet have URLs that are completely filled with junk — at least totally unmemorable for the user. Most likely the title of the page will have something much more useful. One prime example is YouTube where the video URLs are just some way for YouTube to know which video you want.

You’re more likely to remember the title of the page, which directly relates to the content of the video that you previously watched, than remembering even half of the random characters used to identify the video.

Quickly find previously viewed YouTube videos

In this case, I was trying to find Wind Garden [youtube.com], an 8-bit remix of a really great song from Super Mario Galaxy. In other browsers, if I wanted to try finding the page from my history and started typing out “yout,” I would never have found it because somebody linked that video to me from nl.youtube.com. I was able to find it with Firefox 3 because “yout” matched in both the title and URL ignoring the “nl.” part.

Another example of the AwesomeBar’s time-saving ability that will be popular with movie watchers is with IMDb - the Internet Movie Database. If you’re like me and can’t remember which movies every actor has been in, you’ll be revisiting this site over and over again. However, instead of always going to to the main IMDb homepage to find a movie using the search box, you can go directly to the page you want with Firefox 3.

Save time by going directly to movie page

These IMDb results show off yet another strength of the AwesomeBar — being able to match both the URL and title at the same time. Notice that “imdb” only shows up in the url. You can type “imdb” and then a word from the title to quickly narrow down the results to find the exact page you want. This saves you those extra seconds it takes to load the whole IMDb homepage and start a search.

You’ve got phone numbers, account numbers, social security numbers, personal identification numbers, and more numbers to keep track of. There’s no need to additionally keep track of IP addresses for those websites that don’t have easy-to-remember domain names.

No need to memorize IP addresses anymore

Cellphones let you easily find phone numbers by Contact name, and Firefox 3 lets you find IP addresses by Page name. Just like how you need to enter the contact name and phone number the first time on your phone, you’ll need to type in the the IP address once. But on the up-side, you don’t even need to provide a name for the IP address because Firefox 3 will automatically remember the page’s title for you.

Gmail has done a great job with their newest version by providing multiple points of access to their web application. Each message can be accessed directly by URL instead of requiring the user to first load the main Gmail page then searching for a message.

Get right to business with rich internet apps

Being able to access these multiple points of entry is facilitated by the AwesomeBar’s match-anywhere functionality. In this case, you would want to match page titles for email titles, but URLs can also be matched for commands like “new doc” for Google Docs [madhava.com].

By combining the AwesomeBar’s adaptive learning [ed.agadak.net] with the ability to start a Gmail search to find unread messages [mail.google.com] plus automatically selecting the first result [addons.mozilla.org] when pressing enter, I’ve been saving a lot of time whenever I check for new messages. All I need to do is type “mail” and press enter.

Digg it! Edit: Updated for post-Firefox 3 launch intro and a couple new examples.

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].

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.

Turns out that the patch that I sent in to the dev list ended up making it in to Mercurial 1.0 [hg.intevation.org]. No official reviews, no comments. They just checked in the patch to their “crew” (trunk) repository and let it bake for several months. Seems like nobody complained enough to have it backed out and here it is now in Mercurial 1.0 as we can see on hg.mozilla.org.

But this post isn’t about the differences between Mercurial and Mozilla. It’s about the current Mozilla CVS development process vs Mozilla with Mercurial.

One main difference is changesets. Instead of having a separate version number for each file as in CVS, all related changes are grouped together for a changeset. These are the steps one needs to do right now to see all related changes of a patch: 1) use mxr to find the file you’re editing 2) switch to blame to find the checkin 3) click the bug number if provided 4) hope there’s a clearly marked patch as the one checked in to see what else was changed.

With Mercurial, you can just look at the changeset which contains everything; e.g., patch to not need to click the page to use gmail keyboard commands [hg.mozilla.org]. Additionally, now with my patch for showing line numbers in changesets, you can link people to a specific line in a patch [hg.mozilla.org]. This could be useful if you need to point to a particular line in a bugzilla comment about why it broke something. Or especially useful with a stack of patches on mq and you’re collecting feedback on it from other people.

Another aspect of changesets is that there’s a “global version” for the whole repository. You can jump back in time to an earlier revision and view the whole repository as it was before a particular patch was checked in. We currently have something like this on a per-file basis with bonsai, but you need to do so much more work to look at “the right version” of other files. E.g., going back to when adaptive learning was checked in [hg.mozilla.org], you can see that the autocomplete was still only emphasizing the first match in the url and title [hg.mozilla.org].

Of course, you can just use the mercurial web interface to view the latest version of the file. Just take http://hg.mozilla.org/cvs-trunk-mirror/index.cgi/file/tip/ and append the file you want. (Normally “tip” would be a changeset/revision hex number, but you can put in “tip” because it’s an alias (tag) for the latest version.) And from there, you can look at the whole patch for the current version (changeset), browse the checkin history of that file (revisions), or look at the blame (annotate) [unfortunately it doesn't have checkin comments on hover yet].

Typing out that whole url might be cumbersome, but good thing we have the AwesomeBar with multi-word search on word boundaries (with camel case) plus adaptive learning. “hg. auto” [hg.mozilla.org]

I’m not sure how distributed the development process will become for Mozilla, but these neat tools provided by default with Mercurial will make it easier to track changes and refer to them in bugzilla comments or over IRC. (Oh, and if you’re using mercurial and haven’t looked into mq yet, you should do so. It’s a great (builtin) extension to track/reorder multiple patches that you’re working on. And for those curious how I send changes for try-server builds, I apply the stack of patches and hg export firstpatch:lastpatch > combined.patch )