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The new behaviour of a location bar in Firefox 3 might have come as a surprise to some users. And not always a pleasant surprise. It may be “smarter” but it can also ruin the user experience.

Here is some advice how to tweak it “back to normal":

9 tweaks for Firefox 3’s location bar

Firefox extensions which can help:

• OldBar extension (recommended)
• Old Location Bar (still experimental)

OldBar has a more solid feel to it and I will probably keep using it. But I would love to have the old URL lookup algorithm back (these extensions change the look-n-feel but not the algorithm). The one where only the URL is matched and not the page title.

Ian Davis wrote a reply on FriendFeed: “Stick with it [the new location bar], it’s changed how I bookmark (or not) completely.”

With the appearance fixed / improved (using OldBar) the location bar feels more useable already.

Currently it leaves me with mixed impressions: I like that you can enter multiple words in the location bar and they will be searched throughout the URL (and title). For example, enter a part of the hostname and refine the search by adding a part of the name of the file or wiki page. That’s nice.

Still do not like that it is searching in page titles. This is mostly garbage to me because page titles (1) do not uniquely identify the page and (2) do not always properly describe content of the page. Users relying on searching in page titles for locating the webpage of their internet bank can also be a tasty target for phishing.

P.S. Also check out user reviews to the OldBar extension.

… in continuation of a topic of rare books (started with Unbelievable price for a Photoshop book):

Daemon must be an amazing science fiction novel if it gets feedback (#1, #2 from reviews of the paperback edition of “Daemon”) like this:

• “DAEMON is better than early Tom Clancy (when he was good) …”
• “As a computer professional I found the technology in this book believeable –which is it’s most compelling feature. … I loved the book and have bought 7 copies (so far) as gifts …
• “I just finished the most thought provoking cyberpunk novel I think I’ve ever read: The Daemon by Leinad Zeraus.” - see a review by Dustin Kirkland

… hmm, how can a book be rare if it was published less than 2 years ago? Turns out it was sold out and the price of a used book on Amazon is “starting from $95.00″.

If this book has captured your attention and you do not have the book yet, there are some good news. A new hardcover edition is to be published in early January 2009 and is available for pre-order now. A sequel called Freedom™ is expected to follow.

For more information: Daemon book’s page [www.thedaemon.com]

P.S. Weird that author names on the two editions are different - it is Leinad Zeraus on the paperback and Daniel Suarez on the hardcover edition.