Firefox 3 has implemented a few new features on the Location Bar, which also known as Address Bar, to make it a Smart Location Bar, which now has been called by many as Awesome Bar. The new Smart Address Bar now combines recently visited sites, typed URLs, and also bookmarks to its results listing (if you don’t like the mixture, you can disable inclusion of bookmarks and recently visited pages from Location Bar matching results.)

Thus, the Smart Location Bar is radical departure from old Location Bar in Firefox 2 which only takes into account the directly type URLs when showing AutoComplete drop-down list of narrowing down matching URLs as user types text into the Address Bar. In Firefox 3 Awesome Bar, the search for Auto Complete matching links, other than expanded location, also takes into consideration not only the URLs, but also page titles and tags. In the drop-down list, the site’s favicon, page title and bookmark status are also been shown.

By default, the Smart Location Bar gives a list of possible auto completion results up to a maximum of 12 entries. User can change that maximum number of items in the drop-down-list of Location Bar by changing the value of browser.urlbar.maxRichResults.

  1. Type about:config into the Location Bar. When prompted with security warning, click I’ll be careful, I promise! button to enter Firefox configuration page.
  2. Type (or paste) the following text into the filter box: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults, or simply search through the list to locate browser.urlbar.maxRichResults.
  3. Double click on the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults entry. In the “Enter integer value” dialog box, type the maximum number of results to appear in the Location Bar. It can be increase to more than 12, or decrease to less than 12.
  4. Click OK.

Note that the drop-down area of Location Bar can accommodate only six URL items. To see more results (if you increase the maximum number), simply scroll the list.