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Experimental addon shifts Firefox's awesome bar into overdrive
If you use Firefox and want to get a taste of what might be coming in future versions, one addon worth installing is Shawn Wilsher's Asynchronous Location Bar Searches.
Mozilla's thinking is that Firefox will never be fast enough, and this addon takes aim at improving the performance of your awesome bar. I didn't include this one in my three must-haves, but it's a close fourth now that I've spent some time using it. Coupled with my search bookmarks, this has become one of my favorite browser productivity boosters.
While there was an initial glitch that cause some excessive resource use, that has been addressed in more recent builds. The addon has been working very well on my two systems running Firefox 3.5b4.
If you're the daring type and always looking for new ways to speed up Firefox, give the Async addon a try.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsder_tuxmanMay 8th 2009 3:18PM
What the heck did that guy do? It ROCKS!
Very fast input now... yay!
Halo2MasterMay 8th 2009 3:28PM
Hey way to post about how great the extension is without even telling us what it does. All I know is that it "takes aim at improving the performance of your awesome bar."
By doing what? Adding functionality? Making it faster? I don't get it.
Lee MathewsMay 8th 2009 3:39PM
Shawn's words: the addon "use[s] the asynchronous storage API that was added in Firefox 3.1 to help reduce the pain of disk IO on the main thread"
Bottom line: things pop up way more quickly in the bar after I installed it.
Shawn WilsherMay 8th 2009 4:05PM
It reads the data from the disk off of the main thread, so you'll see a big win on systems that have a slow disk. In general, it just makes the application more responsive while results are obtained.
The current version of the add-on does have a problem if you find your result quickly though and select it. You may experience a hang after selecting it. However, I know how to fix this, and you won't need the test add-on in the release after Firefox 3.5. The work is being tracked in Bug 455555 [1] if anyone is interested.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455555
NonprofitTechMay 8th 2009 3:33PM
Man, all I want is for my history to show up in that location bar. Since 3.0 I've tried all the addons and about:config tweaks I could find but I never got this functionality back.
IE8's location bar is AWESOME and I'd be tickled if Firefox would just copy it.
Shawn WilsherMay 8th 2009 4:13PM
More options have been added in Firefox 3.5 that hopefully address your concerns.
VMay 9th 2009 10:31AM
I need some help here...
Before I go back to Fx 3...
I tried to install the plugin you wrote about:
https://services.forerunnerdesigns.com/extensions/get/async-location-bar-test@forerunnerdesigns.com/0.12/
But it keeps telling me that Fx 3.5b4 isn't compatible. I tried a few changes in about:config but had no luck, it was lurking in the dark ;)
So... Can anyone help me please?
Thanks,
V
Lee MathewsMay 9th 2009 10:31AM
Grab the Nightly Tester Tools addon to force the install: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543