In Firefox 3, the location bar learns some new tricks. This has given in the unofficial name of Awesome Bar because it gives a lot more control. Here are some tips to using it,

Tags make it easier

Bookmarking has been made a lot easier thanks to the Star icon to the right of the location bar. Click once, and you’ve bookmarked it. You might not know that you can click again to change the bookmark properties, with a new feature known as “tags.” Fill out the Tag field with keywords about the bookmark. When you want to go back to this page, just type one or few tags in the location bar to see it.

Name and then some

I follow a forum thread which gets increasingly bigger, and I don’t want to subscribe to the forum. Creating a bookmark is useless as it would quickly go out of date as the thread is quite popular. But, as forum software tends to put the first post ID in the URL, I can use that to get to the page quickly. I could easily type in the web site name, but you can also type in parts of the URL and it will still match.

So, if I want a GP Forums thread, each URL contains the word “thread” in them, so I can type “gp forums thread” and it will give me all threads that I have been to on GP Forums, despite “GP Forums” appearing in the title, and “thread” appearing in the URL. I can add the word “gta” and then I get all threads that have “GTA” in the title.

If I want all New Zealand sites I’ve been to about Vodafone, I could go “.co.nz vodafone” and get a list that way.

Turn the frequent search terms into bookmarks

If you find yourself doing a rather common search, you can turn it into a dynamic bookmark that you can access from your bookmarks toolbar or menu. Just go to Bookmarks » Organise Bookmarks, and in Search Bookmarks type in your terms (i.e. “.co.nz vodafone”). Change your Search Area to History and you should get your results that look similar to the location bar ones (without the bookmarks though). Click the Save button and give it a name. It will automatically go into the Bookmarks Menu, you can drag and drop it to where ever you please.

What are your tricks? Comment!