What Browsers Need To Not Suck
I wrote a few days ago about how I dont’ care about web browser add-ons, what does a browser have to do to make me love it?
Why I Didn’t Use Firefox 2 at Home
For a while, Epiphany was my favorite browser, because of its tag-based bookmark system, which it also integrated with the URL-bar’s autocompletion feature.
It was the first browser to convince me that bookmarks are actually useful (whereas in the past, bookmarks weren’t very useful. Sure, you could download an extension for Firefox to make it behave in a similar way, but like I said before that extension won’t work in the next major version of Firefox.
Why I Do Use Firefox 3 at Home
But the good news for Firefox fans is, Firefox 3 will behave more like Epiphany without extensions. And it’s actually pretty sweet.
The moment that convinced me how awesome this feature was when I wanted to go to an obscure page on the wiki at work, which usually takes forever, because the wiki is just so slow. All I had to do was type an obscure word from that article’s title, and Firefox automatically searched my history, and brought that page up to the top of the url autocompletion list. It saved me a lot of time.
After using it for a few weeks, I can tell that I will only need to type “www” or ”.com” under extremely rare circumstances. For the most part, if I’ve visited a page before, I can type natural language into the URL bar, and Firefox will know where I want to go.
And to me, that’s where the bar is. That’s what it takes for a browser not to suck.