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The Awesomebar Needs to be More Awesome

dvnwllms
Making moves

Firefox's address bar is flat out streets behind Chrome's in terms of functionality. There are two big gripes I have with it in its current form:

  1. Autocomplete only works for top level domains. In Chrome if I want to check ESPN's NFL scoreboard the URL is espn.com/nfl/scoreboard. By the time I finish just the "espn" portion of the URL Chrome has already completed it. Firefox will always only ever go to espn.com. That's it. There is a boolean you can change in about:config to mimic this behavior, but it should be like this by default.
  2. Firefox's in bar search results could use Chrome's thumbnails. When searching in Chrome's address bar you'll notice images on the far left of each result, not just favicons. If you type in "Orlando" for example you'll see thumbnails of the city itself, the logo for city's NBA team, images of the actors Orlando Brown & Orlando Bloom, so on & so forth. Firefox in comparison looks barren.

Bridging this gap would make the Awesomebar actually awesome again. In its current form there is nothing awe inspiring.

2 REPLIES 2

jscher2000
Leader

@dvnwllms wrote:

Firefox's address bar is flat out streets behind Chrome's in terms of functionality. There are two big gripes I have with it in its current form:

  1. Autocomplete only works for top level domains. In Chrome if I want to check ESPN's NFL scoreboard the URL is espn.com/nfl/scoreboard. By the time I finish just the "espn" portion of the URL Chrome has already completed it. Firefox will always only ever go to espn.com. That's it. There is a boolean you can change in about:config to mimic this behavior, but it should be like this by default.

What's the preference to show full URLs? To get votes for making that the default, I suggest creating a post over on the Ideas side of the site (if one doesn't exist already) and mentioning it here and on other forums to promote voting.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas


  1. Firefox's in bar search results could use Chrome's thumbnails. When searching in Chrome's address bar you'll notice images on the far left of each result, not just favicons. If you type in "Orlando" for example you'll see thumbnails of the city itself, the logo for city's NBA team, images of the actors Orlando Brown & Orlando Bloom, so on & so forth. Firefox in comparison looks barren.

Firefox populates site icons from a database built when you visit and bookmark sites. I wonder where it would get the other images?

 

Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey @dvnwllms

Thanks for the feedback and sorry to hear the Awesome Bar is lacking awesome-ness for you. But hey, that's what this community is all about—sharing ideas and discussing ways to improve Mozilla products...or even develop new ones! 

I'll pass this thread along to our product team. And if you have some more specific ideas for new features or improvements, feel free to submit ideas on our Ideas board (or search for and support other ideas that have already been posted). The most-voted ideas from Connect are regularly reviewed by our product team for potential development.

Hope this helps and looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts!