Firefox Address Bar

Not sure if there is an extension that does this, but I think the Address bar should allow a more inline search. This would help in cases where you may want to access a specific extension to a URL and you dont want to type in the whole URL or go to google to get the page. For example google feed reader is a few folders down from the google domain. All you would want to do is type in reader and it would bring a list of all URLs that had the term reader in it. This would be much more useful that the old left to right matching of addresses. Ranking of the results could also be done in a clever fashion based on perhaps the number of times I have typed in that link or by some other metric.

The example of what the iTunes search does is a wonderful demonstration of how easy search should be and what can be achieved in usability when we sit down and think about what a typical user wants. People dont like doing tedious things such as typing in www all the time and so a wonderful trick to circumvent this is to type in the name of the site (e.g. yahoo) and then press Ctrl+Enter to get a "www" and a ".com" inserted in the right places. I even found an extension to do this for ".co.uk" addresses but I dont think it works anymore on Firefox 1.5.

I do find a few problems still with the address bar even in the latest version. For example it doesn't prefix the "www" to the start of the URL even when the URL has a "www" in it in the address bar history. This means that a site like www.cs.bham.ac.uk doesn't work from the address bar if I wish to add something to the URL. For example if I want to add a bit onto the URL I have to manually type in the "www" every time after adding the bit at the end. Its these small things that need to be addressed at the moment to take Firefox to the next stage and make it a completely user friendly application.

It might even be a good idea to try and integrate the bookmarks with the address bar like in IE where you can start typing a name and if it happens to be a bookmark it will come up in the address bar regardless of whether there is any other stuff in the address bar history (i.e. even after deleting history).