Get old location bar behavior back?

[Guest]

I have no problem with things moving to a more constructive manner.

How nice of you although it really isn't up to you.

[markofkane]

Yeah! We need to to be more tolerant of others.
I'll admit I was wrong about the way I acted.

but instead of saying "Firefox Sucks" which is an aggressive statement, maybe one could say "could you please help me with a problem I am having?"

And please don't dismiss it . This forum should be about helping others, not chastising them. My 2 cents.

BTW, this forum looks fine to me.

[firefox upgrader]

so when can we get the old algorithm back. my productivity is down 40%

[not-so-awesomebar]

firefox upgrader: do what us others did - downgrade to Firefox 2. The productivity gains alone are worth it.

[notyou]

I have no problem with things moving to a more constructive manner.

How nice of you although it really isn't up to you.

When did I say it was up to me?
All I said was "I have no problem with things moving to a more constructive manner."

[msongs]

firefox upgrader: do what us others did - downgrade to Firefox 2. The productivity gains alone are worth it.

how do we downgrade to firefox 2 and get rid of this awful new version?

thanks!

[harryg]

firefox upgrader: do what us others did - downgrade to Firefox 2. The productivity gains alone are worth it.

how do we downgrade to firefox 2 and get rid of this awful new version?

thanks!

Look here towards the bottom http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Upg ... +Firefox+3

[LIMPET235]

Hi all......Can we please have a little more courtesy in here, thank you.
It's getting so we mods can't grab a cuppa in peace for 5 mins.
We are all, just users helping users, so be more appreciative of the help offered.
Ta.

[Anonymosity]

These are the settings I have in my user.js file (which gets copied to prefs.js). I get only one previous item in the address bar, and it offers something only if the domain name starts with the first letter I type, from what I had typed in previously (this is with Windows with FF3).
user_pref("browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchBehavior", 2);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped", true);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults", 1);

[mobious guess]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

I found out how to fix it, these two fix it. First fixes the problem of it showing unvisited (bookmarked) sites that only barley meet the text you entered and second makes it less ugly

[Guest]

These are the settings I have in my user.js file (which gets copied to prefs.js). I get only one previous item in the address bar, and it offers something only if the domain name starts with the first letter I type, from what I had typed in previously (this is with Windows with FF3).
user_pref("browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchBehavior", 2);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped", true);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults", 1);

Hm... when I tried to use a filter for "autocomplete" in about:config the only thing that came up was "toolkit.autocomplete.richBoundaryCutoff," which is an integer value set with a default of 200 (I am also running on windows). I'm not entirely sure what it does exactly, but from the sounds of it, it should be able to be used to customize the way the autocomplete feature of the location bar works. Though I'm not really the kind of person to mess with this stuff unless I know what the effect will be. =/

[Euchre]

First off, Firefox has searched in History for a very long time by default. On Firefox 1.5 the preference browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped is there and defaulted to false, as well as in Firefox 2. The preference browser.urlbar.autoFill appears in Firefox 2 and is defaulted to false, which is the function that allows you to have an inline autocomplete. If people are thinking the 'old Firefox' just completed based on typed URLs, they are apparently mistaken. The difference is page titles and bookmarks. The behavior of using bookmarks can be overridden as noted in a previous post of mine. The matter of removing the page titles is handled by the Oldbar extension also noted in that post. The only real snags left are the use of page titles and history length and priority.

The first issue of page titles is something for which I have not yet found a solution. There is nothing I can find in the available preferences for the Places 'frecency' system that can overcome this.

In my previous post I stated the preferences for removing the bookmarks and unvisited typed URLs. Now, to add to this, we can fix the other things interrupting a straightforward match to history based purely on order and the intended total length of history.

The second issue of history length and priority can be resolved through setting the preferences for frecency. After setting the bookmark and unvisited items to 0 (zero), next to be sure the typed URLs take precedence over linked pages (which can to some degree indirectly alleviate the page title issue) set the value of places.frecency.linkVisitBonus from it's default of 100 to 10 to effectively match based on history alone (and not visits to a URL), to as low as 20 to keep link visits down to a bare minimum. The more you lower this value, the closer you get to a straight typed URL only effect. Typed URLs are already greatly favored by the frecency system.

To resolve the issue of history length, first off you have to set the true history length preference via about:config. This is achieved by changing the value of browser.history_expire_days to the desired number of days. The preference in the normal settings dialog people are confusing now states to keep the history of visits for 'at least' - and therein lies the trip-up. That value should be lower than your actual history is intended to be. Now that you've set your actual history length, you want to make the frecency system match that so that it will only ever really show you the pages from that period of time. This is done by changing the values of the "Bucket Cutoffs". If you note on that page each preference is a length of days. Each amount of days is a breaking point for a certain score level, starting the present to whatever number of days is listed in places.frecency.firstBucketCutoff (default of 4). Each 'bucket' gets a value based on the preferences in for it's respective "Bucket Weight". If you adjust each Bucket Cutoff to be evenly spaced from the Fourth (last) being your maximum number of history days, down to the First being no less than 1 day (there is no mention if zero is disallowed, but for safety's sake I suggest keeping to above zero). Essentially, this limits you to 4 days of history unless it will accept decimal values. I have not tested this, I'll let someone else braver try. By doing this, items older than your history amount can basically not be scored. They shouldn't be available anyway as they should be removed from history - this will make sure of it. This also sets a nice even priority for the history duration. I do NOT suggest changing the Bucket Weights to begin with, as they are the effective baseline for scoring based on how I assembled this tutorial.

As a final tweak, if you tend to visit some specific pages at a very high frequency compared to all others, you may wish to adjust places.frecency.numVisits to a lower value than the default 10. This effectively reduces the sampling rate (or more precisely, amplification) based on visits amounts. I suggest incrementing this down one whole number at a time and allowing at least a day's worth of browsing or 1/4th your history duration before adjusting it again.

This process should allow you to create results more like you are used to. Please don't take this as defending the Awful... er... 'Awesome' Bar because this is truly more a case of gaming the frecency system to defeat it.

*I am testing these myself on Firefox 3 on a Mac running OS X 10.5 "Leopard" (not what I am currently posting from).

[Trucking Heavy]

Restore is your friend, and mine.

I appreciate this site, a lot.
I've become fairly geeky with FF, from the help I've received here.

Didn't know it wasn't Mozilla, though.

[crisun]

got tired of the awfulbar so i downgraded to 2.0.0.14
its faster and takes up same amount om memory on my computer at least
6 tabs around 100 Mb in FF2 and same in FF3 so no difrecnce for me at all
so im going to countiune with FF2 why use FF3 when you noticed no difference at all except FF2 sames better and faster

[Guest]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

I found out how to fix it, these two fix it. First fixes the problem of it showing unvisited (bookmarked) sites that only barley meet the text you entered and second makes it less ugly

I did what you said and added, browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped" to "true".

Work perfect for me.

Thanks man!!