



Firefox 3's new Smart Location Bar earns its unofficial title of "AwesomeBar" right out of the box. The location bar suggests web site addresses as you type from your bookmarks and history, and learns as you surf, ranking pages you visit more often higher. Still, there aren't a whole lot of ways to configure the "AwesomeBar"'s behavior in Firefox's default options dialog—but there are a few new Firefox extensions that can do it for you. Here are four Firefox 3 add-ons that adjust the smart location bar's behavior in small but useful ways.


Edit Middle 2



By default the "AwesomeBar" suggests URLs based on what you type, but not if you go into a word and edit it in the middle. (For example, if you type "lofe" instead of "life" when looking for Lifehacker, and go back and change that o to an i, the drop-down of suggestions doesn't update.) The Edit Middle 2 extension makes middle edits refresh the suggestion list. [via gHacks]


OldBar



If you don't like the new look of the location bar drop-down—which includes both web page titles and URLs—OldBar can revert it to the sparser, Firefox 2 look, which just includes URLs.

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Hide Unvisited



Narrow down the "AwesomeBar"'s number of suggestions with the Hide Unvisited extension. Hide Unvisited excludes pages you have not visited—that is, aren't in your history since the last time you deleted it or cleared it.


Enter Selects 2



(Experimental, requires Mozilla Add-ons site login to install.)



Skip having to hit the down arrow to select the "AwesomeBar"'s first URL suggestion with Enter Selects 2, which maps the Enter key to the first result. Warning: If you're a big Firefox keyword bookmarker, this will interfere with keyword searches. Otherwise, if you've trained the smart location bar's suggestions to be always right on the first result, just hit Enter to get there with Enter Selects 2.


Location Bar about:config Tweaks

For a couple of about:config tweaks for the location bar, check out the previously posted power user's guide—there you'll learn how to adjust the number of suggestions the "AwesomeBar" offers you, and also how to stop automatically selecting the current URL.






How awesome has the smart location bar in Firefox 3 been for you? You loving or hating it? Anything you wish it did or didn't do? Let us know what you think in the comments.