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Comment by andyking | Hacker News Reader

I love that bar, I don't even need to bookmark pages I visit a lot any more. All I need to do is type, say, "yc" and up pops this site. "tv" will show me tonight's TV listings. "gu" brings up the Guardian.

If I wanted to come back to this story, "yc firefox" would most likely bring me here and to any other HN stories I'd read with Firefox in the title. And so on. I didn't really like it when it was first brought in (change? no!) but it's grown on me.

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i love it too. Another great advantage: you don't have to remember the exact url/domain name, which is getting difficult to spell these days.

All I need to do is type, say, "yc"

Why is this good? I type the letter "n" and news.ycombinator comes up. (I'm on ff 2.0). If I type "yc" I get this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

It's deterministic, being alphabetic, and superior in every way. I don't want the fricken address bar throwing dice on my input.

The key distinction being the ability to find the URLs that you don't know by fishing for the one piece you do remember, that may (inconveniently) not be until the end of the URL.

An example: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ which I inevitably reach by typing "big"; this was un-possible with the previous iterations.

Fair point, but if I type "n" I could well end up with news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com or any number of other sites I've been looking at. There aren't many sites with the "yc" combination of letters.

Out of all the reasons a person could dislike Firefox 3, I never understood why this one is so important.

Because it reduces predictability at first. It used to be that I could predict what site would be at the top when I typed even a single letter, so I could triple-click, hit a letter, down-arrow, enter, and not have to actually parse what the dropdown list says. Safari (on my Mac, anyway) still has this property, except without the down-arrow, so it's even faster. With the "ultra-cool bar" or whatever it's called, I have to pay attention each and every time, which slows my browsing to the eight or ten sites I actually visit most, but which I don't bother to bookmark because I know exactly where they are.

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