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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.