Firefox 3.0 aggravations

[Steve Lamb]

Alan Milnes wrote:
> However if you REALLY want to disable it - I would encourage you to give 
> it more of a try first - then here you go:-

> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/17/dont-think-the-firefox-3-awesome-bar-is-awesome-heres-how-t/

     Trust me, I gave it more of a first try.  The main complaint is not how 
it looks.  The main complaint is that the way the search worked changed. 
Instead of matching only the first letters of the URL (/^dm/ in regex) it now 
matches anywhere in the URL (/dm/) *and* the title.  This is significant 
because many people, myself included, have a ton of sites we simply don't 
bookmark.  We type 2-3 characters and get the site we want.

     dm, for example, is my webmail interface.  fo becomes my guild's forums. 
  ra becomes my guild's raid sign-up sheet.  br becomes one of my favorite 
sites to visit daily.  wa is my banking site.  bu, on the other hand, goes to 
the official forums of another game I play.

     With the new change fo now brings up every site who has the string "fo" 
in the URL and title.  That's not an uncommon number of sites especially given 
the many different locations for "forum" which do not show up at the beginning 
of the URL.  Same for ra, br, wa and bu.  In fact it causes problems with fo 
and bu because fo was for my guild's forums in one game while bu was for the 
official forums of BUrningsea.com/forums.

     Now that fo brings up both Firefox's decent feature of weighting returns 
based on what was chosen previously means inconsistent returns.  bu will 
always bring up the Burning Sea forums but fo will now place either my guild's 
forums or the Burning Sea forums first depending on which has the higher count 
lately.

     Why am I explaining all of this?  Simple.  The above URL tells you how to 
turn off the presentation.  The search algorithm is not changed.  The old 
search style was still there as of 3.0b3.  The devs removed the option in 
about:config to switch back to it and flat out told the many people who were 
complaining about it, in Bugzilla, that they'll just have to get used to this 
change in basic browsing habits.  They went on to explain that if people 
really were upset about it they could write an addon to address it.

     Look, many people switched to Firefox not only because they wanted to get 
away from IE but because it promised a lack of bloat, speed and strong basics 
of browsing.  This feature now has the devs telling their users to turn off a 
highly disliked feature they have to *add* to the browser to *take-away* from 
it.  Does that sound like a lack of bloat, speed or strong basics?  Doesn't to me.