If you are a Firefox user, then most probably you have updated to Firefox 3 by now. Apart from being faster, leaner and better looking than the previous version, Firefox 3 has some great new features built into it, one of which is the smarter address bar.

One of the most used area in a browser is the Address Bar or the Location Bar, as Firefox calls it. Functionally, the new Location Bar in Firefox 3 is pretty smart and has been dubbed as the Awesomebar.

As you start typing into it, it fetches the matching results from:

1. Web addresses from pages in history that match what you have typed
2. Page titles from history that match what you have typed
3. Bookmark titles that match what you have typed
4. Bookmarks with tag names that match what you’ve typed

When you first start using it, you may be a little confused with the number of results that appear in the list when you start typing an address. You may find apparently unrelated links showing at the top of the list. Some people even consider it an annoyance rather than a useful feature and tweak the about:config to get the Firefox 2 behavior.

But the fact is that, as you continue using it, you will find that the results are more relevant and you begin to see the usefulness of the navigation bar. Every time you type in some text and then choose a link from the displayed results, Firefox 3 remembers the text that you entered and the page that you selected. So the next time you make a similar search, the particular page will be displayed higher up in the list. Basically, the search results are ordered based on how frequently and how recently the page was accessed.

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