Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Sure it's a nice feature, but theres still many regressions between Firefox 2.0 and 3.0b5 (and nightly).. I can only hope 3.0-final will fix most of these.

I am very happy with FireFox3b5. I have actually switched from Safari to using it as my main browser.

Now i am hoping the healthy competition will ensure that the next release of Safari is good enough to make me switch back. Thus ensuring that Mozilla co. works hard to make an even better browser.

Competition is amazing.

The AwesomeBar is the Firefox 3 killer feature that makes it a pain to use any other browser once you get used to it (even Firefox 2).

Great work!

It would be GREAT if you could fix the issue where "print selection" won't work in FF3

Best thing to do with the "awesome bar" is turn it off. It's horrible!

I'm not real thrilled with the awesome bar either - it takes up a lot of real estate.

yeah, no, i am definitely not a fan of the awesome bar. i would definitely vote to have the ability to turn it off. why? because it doesnt look good. its a nice idea in concept, but the execution is busy, confusing, and not at all "keep it simple." i realize that firefox has to grow, but it seems like a kitchen sink sorta feature that was poorly executed.

John, what do you mean? It doesn't take up any more space than the old address bar did. All the interesting stuff happens in the drop-down.

Kelson,
In firefox 2, you could turn off the the dropdown if you disable history. I think what he's asking for is the ability to turn off the dropdown in Firefox 3.

PS: Personally, I wouldnt turn it off.

Hmm, also not a big fan of the Awesome Bar (tm). And actually, as opposed to user Cameron I've started using Safari instead of FF... sorry. It's a lot slower to start up on my ancient Powerbook G4, compared to Safari. Also the feature of FF that's been bothering me lately that it starts up Fullscreen. Why's that? I'd like to start the new window like I left it the last time I used it... Would that be possible at all?

For my daily surfing I like Safari much better, for development I still use FF the most, mainly because FireBug is so awesomely awesome. Much more than your bar...

I'd love to turn the bar off. That was my biggest pet peeve with the 3.0 betas.

I suppose I should explain a bit. To me, the "awesomebar" was the perfect example of "Hey, I know what you're trying to do better than you do! Let me @#$% it up for you!" in software design. Not just a bad idea, but a truly horrible one. It's nicely executed, but it's still a horrible idea.

I've been using nightlies on Vista and Leopard for about a month now, and I have become strangely attached to the Awesomebar. When I am forced to use IE7 (eg Netflix WIN) I try to use awesomebar features and it fails and I cry.

It might be awesome, but Awesome Bar is absolutely horrendous branding.

To those criticizing the "branding" of awesomebar, it's worth noting that it wasn't a branding lable. I'd encourage you to re-read the original post:

"We've affectionately been calling it the Awesome Bar -- not because that name's great branding but because it really is just awesome."

Yeah, but the only people who use the word "awesome" are Microsoft marketers and characters from "The Office".

Bucky, that's a silly statement. Lots of people and companies other than Microsoft and the Office characters use the word Awesome. It's actually a rather popular descriptor in US and European popular culture and has been for about 30 years.

These days I only hear it used ironically - except in the case of companies who are deaf to popular culture like Microsoft, of course. I think Keanu Reeves ruined that word. Really, it's very dated.

I have to say the Awesome Bar is my favorite new feature in Firefox 3... I think it'll just take a little while before most people get used to it.

Its a shame our right to choose to disable it has been removed. And as for the 'bug' report used to justify disabling it, there certainly wasn't any case made that I could see.

Doug, I'm not sure where you got the idea that you had a right to bits of code that Mozilla developers choose to remove.

If that was the case, that every person who ever used a Mozilla product could demand that no old feature ever be removed or replaced with a new version, we wouldn't have Firefox in the first place. When we created Firefox from Mozilla, we removed and re-wrote about 95% of the user-facing features. Perhaps you should go dig up an old Mozilla suite build from before we created Firefox and use that. (and no, SeaMonkey wouldn't be a good choice since they too have removed and replaced quite a few features from the product.)

If you know anything about software development, you'll know that you cannot build a sustainable product by a purely additive process. Things must be re-written. Things must be removed. Things must progress. If we left in every old feature when a new feature replaced it or left every previous expression of that feature in the code and available as a user preference, the program would be literally unusable, insecure, and unmaintainable.

If you feel that passionately, then you should write your own browser, write an extension to give you the features you want in Firefox, or find someone to help you do one of those two things.

Users do not have a right to every feature that was ever written in Mozilla as it was originally written. Granting such rights would mean the immediate collapse of the product.

- A

No one is talking to you anymore.
FF 3 is an 'awesome' failure.
Keep on tellin' stories Asa.