One of my favorite new features of Firefox 3 is the Smart Location Bar, which allows users to recall not only their typed URL history, but also their bookmarks and page titles. The behavior of the bar can be tweaked to suit your needs. First of all, let me say that one of the features I have heard requested the by more than one person is the ability to prevent the Smart Location Bar from searching Page Titles altogether, while retaining the rest of its functionality. While you can disable the Smart Location Bar completely, version 3.0.1 does not allow you to eliminate Page Titles alone from the search results. However, the newly-released alpha build of Firefox 3.1 does allow you to do this, so watch for that soon. Now, on to the tweaks.
All of these settings are accessed by going up to your Smart Location Bar and typing about:config. Tell it that “I’ll be careful, I promise!” and continue. Here are a few settings to play with:
- browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped - Changing this from false to true will cause the bar to only search URLs you have actually typed in - it will no longer search your bookmarks or links you have clicked.
- set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults - This defines the maximum number of search results the Smart Location Bar will display. The default is 12. Setting it to 0 will effectively disable the bar altogether.
- places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus - Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks you have not visited.
- places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus - Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks that you have visited. Setting this and the above option both to 0 effectively removes bookmarks from the search.
- places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus - This setting has three possible values and will greatly modify the search results. A value of 0 will give you results based on what you type being present anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item to be searched, assuming you have not narrowed what is seatched using one of the above tweaks. A value of 1 will result with what you typed being displayed anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item, followed by results that begin with what you typed. Finally, a value of 2 will show only results where what you have typed is present in the beginning of a URL, bookmark or history item.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 gives you many more options for tweaking the Smart Location Bar. If you want to check it out, you can get it here. Keep in mind it is an alpha build and is technically intended only for developers. I’ve had it installed for a couple days now though with no problems. You can see a list and examples of changes to the Smart Location Bar here.
The Smart Location Bar (Awesome Bar) is a fantastic new component to a terrific browser. If you aren’t a fan though or just want to change its behavior, hopefully this will help get you started.
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