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December 10, 2004
The Autocomplete Revolution?
DHTML autocompletion got a wide spread boost by Google's new beta of Google Suggest. Yahoo Mail today also sent an email about it adding autocompletion to its webmail program - and it works in Gecko!
Natrually neither are revolutionary - this has been done before. I believe AOL's webmail has done that for ages (been 2 years since I had an AOL account, and they don't give free accounts to laid off contractors :), and I even once did that for AOL's custom bugzilla.
I laugh at reading the slashdot articles with people wondering how it could be done in JavaScript and so fast. I'm sure most web developers would ask the same, which is a shame. Props to Google for doing this the right way and cleanly.
The browser is a platform, remember! Not just for porn and table layouts.
Posted by doron at December 10, 2004 7:17 PM
Comments
How about doing this in XUL for the toolbar search?
http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/december/featurerequest
Posted by: Steven Garrrity at December 10, 2004 8:23 PM
People have been underestimated / ignored JavaScript for a long long time...
With the gaining popularity of Gecko browsers, hopefully more (so-called) web developers will be aware of this powerful feature in modern web browsers. :-)
Posted by: minghong at December 10, 2004 10:56 PM
You're missing a bit from the link there, so it won't take you to Google Suggest. Try this:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Posted by: Peter Kasting at December 10, 2004 11:44 PM
Or the nicer-looking http://labs.google.com/suggest
Posted by: Greg K Nicholson at December 11, 2004 10:32 AM
GMail does autocomplete in the address bar - although I suspect that all the addresses are stored locally. I suspect he may have reused some technology, though.
(DOM Inspector doesn't work well on GMail. Grr.)
Posted by: Gerv at December 11, 2004 1:53 PM