Now that Firefox 3 [mozilla.com] has been downloaded well over 27 million times [mozilla.com], many people have noticed that the Smart Location Bar can find pages that match not only in the URL but also in the title or tags added to a bookmarked page. One commonly overlooked feature that saves you a lot of time is the ability to quickly narrow down the search results and find exactly what you want. Just type another word.

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.

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. 🙂

It seems that Mercurial and Mozilla have quite different patch/review process, but then again they’re two very different projects. I just found out today that Bug 394650 – Make line numbers linkable when viewing files/annotate for hg.mozilla.org [bugzilla.mozilla.org] was “works for me.” I was confused for a little bit; but yes indeed, annotate/changeset views on hg.mozilla.org have linkable line numbers for each file… just like how I would have coded it. 😉

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 😀 )