Firefox 3.1 beta - Awesome Bar

What's New
The Awesome Bar is truly AWESOME! I LOVE IT! But the best part? It keeps getting more awesome with each update! So what's new with the Bar in Firefox 3.1?

• Source filtering of search results on-the-fly (using typed characters/symbols)
• Always-on source filtering of search results (using about:config preferences)
• Multiple Smart Keyword search previews

The Awesome Bar
For those who have no idea what the Awesome Bar is, it's FF3's Smart Location Bar. It's smart because:

• it lets you search your history, bookmarks
• it searches within URLs, titles, tags
• search results update on-the-fly: with each keystroke
• results are sorted based on frecency: a value calculated from frequency and recency of visits
• it's FAST!

The Problem
But before FF3.1, the Bar certainly did have its share of pesky personality issues. For example:

Let's say I want to search for a page I visited a while back and I know it's still in my history. It's about "firefox", so I type that into the Bar. Turns out, I have loads of "firefox"-related bookmarks and tags flooding the results. Before, there was no way of telling the Bar to not search in my bookmarks, or at least not show bookmarks in the results (there was an add-on for it though). In other words, you couldn't tell it to search only in my history.

The Solution
Now, we have 2 new ways of doing exactly that. Now I can type "firefox ^" and it will only search pages in my history. You can even change ^ to any character/word you want, using about:config. Similarly, you can tell it to only search in bookmarks, or tags, or even combine symbols to do AND searches.

Here are the corresponding about:config entries

• browser.urlbar.restrict.history: ^
• browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark: *
• browser.urlbar.restrict.tag: +

To do an AND search, you can do something like "google * ^", to look for Google-related bookmarks that you have also recently visited (history).

What you can also do is narrow down results by enforcing URL- and/or title-matching. Let's say I'm looking in my history for an article I read about the WWW. Typing "www" in the Bar obviously doesn't really help, because most sites already have "www" in their URL. But if I try searching page titles instead, like this, "www #", it easily finds my article, titled "WWW - History and Evolution".

Here are the corresponding about:config entries:

• browser.urlbar.match.url: @
• browser.urlbar.match.title: #

If you prefer that your searches are always restricted to a particular source filter(s) by default, you can change the corresponding keyword to an empty string in about:config. For example, you can have the Bar always search only tags and titles by changing the urlbar.restrict.tag and urlbar.match.url entries to "" (empty string). This way, the Bar won't search through your bookmarks, history, or URLs, at all.

Smart Keyword Searching
Finally, the updated Bar now also lets you preview the automatically generated Smart Keyword search URL(s). For those who haven't used Smart Keyword searches before, here's how it works:

Let's say you search eBay a lot. With Smart Keyword searching, you can right-click the eBay search box, select "Add a Keyword Search", and give it a letter/keyword that you'll use when you want to search eBay directly from the Smart Bar (I use 'e'). So, for example, now I can type "e light saber" to search eBay for Star Wars Light Sabers directly from the Bar.

What's new in FF3.1 is that now you can give the same keyword to multiple Smart Keyword bookmarks (that's actually how it works: smart bookmarks), and then you can select which one you want to use on-the-fly. For example, I have 2 Smart Keyword bookmarks set to 'i': Google Images and Flickr. So when I type "i bmw m5", I'm given 2 options so I can choose which search I want to go ahead with. Just pressing Enter defaults to the search you added first (I think).

The Low-Down
I now find the Search box redundant and I've simply removed it. The Awesome Bar caters perfectly to all my Search needs: offline and online. Examples: g for Google (actually it defaults to Google even without the g), d for Define, w for Wikipedia, i for Image Search, m for Maps Search, y for YouTube Search, t for Google Translate (Auto->EN). Defaulting to Google means you can directly use it as a calculator, conversions and all. It feels like you're interacting with an intelligent being, compared to the dumb bar in FF2. My productivity has shot up; Browsing the Web now feels easier even than navigating your local OS. One last point: I think it's only fair to mention here that Google's Chrome and IE8 (to some degree) also offer similar functionality. But overall, they come nowhere near FF3!

How Dumb Do They Come!?
A blog entry on the Awesome Bar is incomplete without mention of the controversy surrounding it. Many users don't like the new Bar and want an option to get the old FF2 one back. I simply do not understand WHY. Many are probably just confused or clinging. Anyway, I don't see any major harm in letting them get their way. If there was a checkbox they could use to switch back to the old bar, most of them would be more than happy to stick with Firefox. On second thoughts though, most of them won't have the heart to leave Firefox even if they don't get that checkbox! Trust me! ;)

KDE 4.1 - Preliminary testing, Plasma mainly

At long last, I decided to give KDE4 a try. After playing around with KDE 4.1 on Kubuntu 8.10 beta for around an hour, I had mixed views.

I have a decent laptop, so I installed Kubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. I gave it 800MB of RAM and 48MB of graphics, loaded the ISO, and fired up the LiveCD. When it got to the KDE splash screen, there was a severe amount of lag as it rendered the fancy graphics. Anyway, I let it load the desktop but found it impossible to do anything because of the lag. So I boosted the VM's graphics to 128MB and tried again. This time there were no graphics issues, and promptly I was presented with a very pretty desktop.

The LiveCD experience was a bit sluggish, but that's normal. Did I mention the desktop looked pretty? The Application Launcher (K Start menu) was decent too: snappy, well-organized. So I decided to install Kubuntu on the VM for some casual KDE4 testing.

I wasn't expecting it to be too responsive (in a VM) but it did fine. It only used about 180MB of RAM for a fresh desktop session and went up to about 240MB with 6 apps running. The processor wasn't being worked too hard either (Disclaimer: I'm a regular Vista user ;)

I got 2 app crashes soon after the desktop loaded (one was something to do with Python, and the other was the Hardware Drivers app), though I'm guessing this was really just a VM issue.

I wasn't running on full-fledged video drivers so I didn't bother to test Desktop Effects. I really just wanted to check out the overall usability of the new WM/DE.

So here's my preliminary take on it (pending more usage scenario testing):

The default widget set is mediocre, at best. Widget customizability is nearly nil. For example:

• What's with the centered resize? (can we get an edge-drag-style resize please?)
• The rotate function just feels silly.
• You can't move the Desktop widget by dragging it by its Title bar.
• Widget layering just isn't available: I put the Trash widget on top of the Desktop widget and it went below, and then I had to move/resize the Desktop to access the Trash.
• The System Tray widget (for one) is so buggy it's almost non-functional when used outside of a panel.
• I can't seem to find a way to lock individual widgets. !?
• There's no edge-snapping with the screen/panels/widgets while dragging or resizing widgets. So although moving/resizing widgets can be done pixel-perfect, it's a pain to get them all neatly placed and uniformly sized.
• While dragging to resize a widget, a static graphic of the widget is shown being stretched to size, instead of dynamically resizing the widget object itself in real-time. It's plain ugly. Aren't these supposed to be vector graphics?

Also, once, when I logged out and back in, all my widgets had been shoved off into the upper left corner; I wasn't able to reproduce the bug later though.

Panels are even more ridiculous:

• You can't stack a panel on top of another. Instead, panels just overlap each other. !?
• You can't drag-drop widgets from panel to panel. Or even panel to desktop, or vice versa. !!??
• In fact, you can't directly drag-drop to relocate a panel, or even drag-drop widgets within a panel, without having to open the panel's adjustment bar. This is just a click away, and so may be forgiven, but still.
• Resizing the panel length-wise is fine. But when you resize it breadth-wise, the contents don't always scale correctly. For example, I can resize the bottom Panel to a narrower height, but then the bottoms of the widgets get cut off below a certain height.

KDE3 has better panels, in my opinion. Heck, even Windows 98 had better panels ;)

Dolphin, the file manager, is pretty good. I didn't test it inside-out, but it feels stable and quick. I've never really liked Konqueror so I didn't bother checking it out; for now at least. Okular and DragonPlayer are good. I have no idea where KSysInfo has disappeared though. Not sure whether they've removed it in KDE4 or in Kubuntu. Does anyone know the new way to check my System Info. I tried the Hardware Drivers app but it crashed.

Overall, I was expecting Plasma to be a lot more usable by now. And even the eye-candy department needs quality assurance. I mean, it's already at 4.1! Do we wait till 4.5 or something now? I didn't test previous releases exactly because I knew they weren't going to be usable. Looks like I needed a reality check on how far KDE4 still has to go. Poor me. I really want KDE4 to do well, I DO!

I'm thinking I should install Kubuntu on my actual system and further test it for a day or two to see if I can generate an organized list of crucial usability/QA issues with Plasma, and present them to the KDE team. KDE4 has tried to implement brave new concepts. It has loads of potential. But the execution is still below par on the usability front, and that's what really counts. I don't doubt that it will change for the better, but how much longer do we have to wait.