Firefox 3 – Rich address bar – Usability is in the details

This morning I got curious about Firefox 3 beta 4 when I read;

First look: Firefox 3 beta 4 brings new Vista hotness.

And especially;

Efforts to improve Firefox performance have continued steadily, and developers say that the latest beta is twice as fast as Firefox 2 when running popular web applications like Zoho Office and GMail. Aggressive memory reduction has been a high priority during the Firefox 3 development cycle, and it clearly shows in this beta release. 

Since I’m temporarily on a very slow mobile Internet connection I can use all the performance improvements I can get to give me some extra sense of speed.  So I was glad I could download the installer (only 6.8 MB for my Dutch installation) and do the smooth installation besides my current Firefox 2 installation and give it a try.

O man it’s great. Amazing. And the performance is indeed great, but there was something that struck me even more.

Rich address bar

I want to show you one little feature improvement that I like so much that it, in isolation, would be enough to convince me to upgrade.(Well not really, I can only make the switch between two versions of Firefox once most of my addons are compatible with the new version.) But this in my humble opinion is priceless!

Here it is, look what they’ve done to the address bar’s suggest functionality. Instead of printing a list of urls Mozilla upgraded it to a list that gives so much more information!

Look, so much information in a beautiful compact format;

• Page URLs.
• Page titles. Much more informative then mere (semantic or not) url’s.
• Page icons. I like those.
• Bookmarked or not. Indicated by a star.

And this is all I discovered in a quick first glance, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s even more information in there. And then the interaction is wonderful. See what happened as I typed just “th” in the address bar.

There’s URL’s in that list that don’t start with “th”, like the first Flickr url. (I think that’s in the top of the list because I just visited Flickr to upload a picture for this blog post.) Notice that there’s even url’s in that list that don’t even contain a consecutive ‘t’ and ‘h’. See there’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us an URL not containing “th”, but a page that contains “th” in it’s title! Brilliant isn’t it? Excellent way to search for pages, much closer to how my mind works, since this allows me to remember pages by the subject they discussed (probably something I vividly remember since I would otherwise wouldn’t want to search it back) and not by their URL. And it’s wonderful to see that the parts of the strings in the list that match your address (or must I say “search query“) are highlighted as you type!

Thank you Firefox for making my day! I can’t wait to see Firefox 3 get out of it’s beta stage! Bring it on.