One of the standout features in Firefox 3 was the so-called "Awesome bar," the revamped URL bar that now doubles as a search tool for quickly finding bookmarks, visited pages and more. With Firefox 3.1 just over the horizon some new improvements to the URL bar mean even more awesomeness is on its way.
We already told you about the fancier tab switching tools that will be in Firefox 3.1, but possibly even more useful is the ability to use wildcard characters to narrow the results for your URL bar searches.
Ryan Wagner over at CyberNetNews recently dug into the about:config settings in the latest nightlies of Firefox, and points out a number of new preference that create wildcards. The settings are:
- browser.urlbar.match.title (#): Returns results that match the text in the title.
- browser.urlbar.match.url (@): Returns results that match the text in the URL.
- browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark (*): Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
- browser.urlbar.restrict.history (^): Returns only results that are from the browser's history.
- browser.urlbar.restrict.tag (+): Returns only results that have been tagged.
So if you read a cool article on Webmonkey recently, but can't remember the title, you could simply type @ webmonkey ^. The @ would restrict the search to only the webmonkey.com domain and the ^ would tell Firefox you're only interested in results from the browser's history (not bookmarks or things tagged "Webmonkey").
It looks potentially very powerful, almost like a boolean search, but tailored to Firefox's search possibilities.
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