~robcee/ field notes of a pyroentomologist, now 33% snappier!

AwesomeBar Awesome Feature #832

A friend of mine mentioned how awesome the new Firefox 3 beta is last night while we were playing a little Halo. “I know,” I told him, maybe a little cockily.

Undeterred, he plowed on, “the best new feature is, you know how you can collapse the toolbar and location bar on the Mac? With that little capsule button in the corner?”

“Yeeaah,” I offered, eager to hear where this was going, figuring he was going to say something like, you know it makes the browser area bigger, right?

“Well, now when you’ve got it collapsed, you can hit Cmd-L and a little Location Bar drops down.”

I let this sink in for a minute, realizing I was in uncharted territory.

“You mean I can hit Cmd-L and a Location Bar appears out of nowhere?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah! It totally saves all kinds of space on my MacBook!”.

“O.M.G.” I think I said.

So, yeah, that little useless capsule button? Not so useless anymore. And having the full awesome power of the AwesomeBar available on Cmd-L in a collapsed toolbar? I can’t even tell you how cool that is.

It’d be great if this wasn’t a sheet and the full awesomebar dropdown was shown for autocomplete…

…but still SUPER cool. Who implemented this? Beer will be bought.

that’s very cool, I checked it out in Firefox 2.0.0.13 and it works as well.

It’s not the *full* power of the awesomebar until it shows both URLs and titles.

Coincidentally, this feature is broken on trunk right now. See bug 425798.

This is groovy — unfortunately though, when the command bar is minimized and I press Command+K to get to the search box, I am simply redirected to Google. I would much rather have a drop down box for search as well.

Jesse: yeah, gavin informed me that he broke this feature right around the time I blogged about it. Well done!

Zak: I agree and was thinking the same thing.

While I’m agreeing with people, I agree with Colin too, that it’d be super slick if the UI was a sliding text box with the awesomebar in it instead of a sheet.

Nevertheless, I still think it’s a great new feature.

Ahh, so it’s like what Safari does in that situation, only gratuitously modal.

Rob / Jesse: see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408007 about using the full AwesomeBar in the two other UI areas where it might make sense.

Cool!

I’ve always wondered how to do something similar to the windows F11/Fullscreen in OS X.

Hawt!

New feature? Sigh. Even Mozilla 1.x had that feature, although you had to press Accel+Shift+L to get it.

Neil: but it was only 1/10th as awesome…

Any way to do this with a shortcut instead, so I don’t hav o take my hands of the keyboard?

mark: not sure of any way to collapse the toolbars via the keyboard. Maybe Neil knows.

Neil?

This would be a great add-on. Wish I knew how to write them.