Quote:The new version of firefox went and messed that up too.
Mainly because they altered the way it works.
Whereas the classic approach to inline autocomplete was, if you started typing a word, it would suggest URLs with the term you've entered as close to the start as possible; example, if you start typing "lurk" into the address bar, then it would look for URLs
starting with "lurk": "lurkerlounge.com", etc.
Firefox 3, on the other hand, decided to do two things to change this. The first is that it's inline autocomplete checks
the entirity of the URL, not just the logical progression. So in short, if you have any URLs in your browsing history with the word "lurk" anywhere in them, then those will get suggested too; often at the expense of URLs that
start with "lurk".
Not content with how badly they screwed that up, they threw in the option that the address bar will also search
page titles as well, and placing higher priority on these results than inline URL results. So, say, you've visited this forum every day of your life (No reason why not), but then follow
this link (Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency May
Lurk in Breastfed Babies - NYTimes.com), which does not feature the word "lurk" in the URL
at all but features in the page title,
that result will leap to the top of the search possibilities every time, until it passes from your search history like an unwanted kidney stone.
Right now, this is about the only thing I'd like to change with FF3, purely because it's idiotic and counter-intuitive (When I'm looking for a URL, I can't remember the contents of the page title, but I
do remember snippets of the URL). Another thing that grated was the appearance of the URL dropdown, which displayed the page title in
big letters and the URL underneath almost as an afterthought. That was fixed quickly enough (On FF3 launch date, no less) with
OldBar, which switches the AwesomeBar (It's not guys, seriously) with a dropdown that's just like it used to be, but still retains the quirky search system.
Old Location Bar looks like it could fix both of these problems, so I'm waiting for that.
But anyway, this thread isn't about grievances with Firefox, it's about Chrome. I can't see me switching to Chrome in the interim for three reasons:
1) It's new. Seriously, when it comes to web browsers it never really pays to make a switch-to until it's been given a thorough testing, especially since a pretty nasty
security flaw was identified on day one. There's also a serious amount of complaints about lagging keystrokes (Which was a feature of the first Firefox build I tried and was an instant turn-off) and scrolling up.
2) No Adblock. I'm not against ads in the most part, providing they don't lag too badly. On the other hand, one type of ad I hate are embedded pop-ups on the page, often Flash, and often with the "close" button in some really obscure place that prevents you from interacting with the page in any way until you rummage around for the X that kills the ad or click on the ad itself. Annoying, annoying, annoying. Since installing Adblock, I've seen practically none of these on the sites (usually gaming ones) that throws these at you. It doesn't matter how fast a webpage loads under Chrome, unless they can
guarantee that these types of ads are blocked (And that may never happen, since Google make most of it's revenue through various advertising schemes), I won't switch.
3) The look: No title bar? No menu bar? For some reason these things irk me.
Oh, and just in case I didn't use the word "lurk" enough to break some kind of record: Lurk, lurk, lurk, lurk, lurkity, lurking lurk. Lurkers.
