407437 - New completion in address bar not an improvement

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 393678

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Christiaan Hofman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007120704 Minefield/3.0b2pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007120704 Minefield/3.0b2pre

I do believe that the changes to the completion in thye address bar (using a large title and a small URL with a light color) is not an improvement. I personally think it's a regression. It gives a worse overview. The title is far too big, so a lot less items are displayed. Also the title is often not informative at all, so it's not useful to choose an item. This is in conjunction with the fact that much looser matching is used (substring match, and also match of titles), so there are in fact more matches. So I get more matches but less matches that can be displayed, in all less useful. Also, when I'm typing a URL, the URLs that start with what I'm typing are more relevant. But they often do not turn up at the top.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start typing a URL in the address field
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
A small number of displayed matches with huge titles and hard to read URLs. Moreover matches to the title, not the URL.

Expected Results:  
I expect to get matches for the URL I'm typing, not the (often useless) title.

Comment 1

[Brett]

I do agree with you in a way. It's just not what I'm used to. I'm not sure I'd want it changed back, I'd have to see. 

Your enhancement request is similar to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240397. Maybe you should take a look at that page and see if you can find more support for changing it back.

Comment 2

[Elmar Ludwig]

Please only report one issue per bug report. Most of the problems mentioned in comment #0 have already been filed, see for example:

bug 407204 – make the title and url text in autocomplete result the same size
bug 393678 – location bar autocomplete should take word boundaries in account
bug 404261 – Autocomplete favours impractical items

I'm marking this as a duplicate of bug 393678, which is about the same problem.