Location Bar

Ever since the release candidates were released, a lot of people were raving about the new location bar. For me, probably I’m suffering from transition woes. Still, I’m not liking it at all. I feel that the new drop-down that features two lines per URL (the URL with the page title and a description if found in your bookmarks) is very obtrusive. The auto-highlighting annoys me too. If you share my sentiments, then here are a few of workarounds to make your browsing experience just a bit more bearable.

The first workaround is to tweak the number of links to be shown. By default, mine shows 12 links with half visible before you have to scroll down. To tweak this, you have to access the almighty about:config page, which in Firefox 3 now shows a warning message before getting access.

1. In the filter bar, type in browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
2. Double-click “value” and put in the number of links you want displayed. I set mine to 3.
3. Click OK.
4. Restart Firefox to enable the changes.

You can also tweak the behavior of the bar to want only those entries that have been previously typed.

1. In the filter bar, type in browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped
2. Double-click “value” to change it to “true”.
3. Restart Firefox to enable the changes.

If still, you don’t really like how the location bar behaves and desperately miss the old location bar, then download oldbar – an add-on for Firefox 3 that gives you the old functionality of the location bar as with Firefox 2.

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