Too often there comes a time when a favorite program or website “sells out” and becomes bloated with features that are either not necessary or add to user distrust (why do they want to store my browser history so long…?). I’ve long been a big fan of Firefox. But, Firefox finally hit that treshold with me at version 3 with their damned nosy and unwieldly location/address/url bar. I think they actually do call it the “Awesome bar,” which to me smacks of development/management going too far just for the sake of developing new stuff, awesome or not. I don’t want rich results, or my bookmarks displayed, or some fancy frecency rating. Give me a location bar the holds a small history in the dropdown of things I typed or visited that only goes back as far as when I last closed down firefox, and autocomplete only based on that list. That’s not hard!

I shouldn’t have to find a browser add-on to give me my desired previous location bar behavior, but in this case I had to. The add-on Old Location Bar 1.3 gives me exactly what I wanted. It is experimental so you have to log into AMO to get it, but if you don’t want to bother, there is a link embedded in the long description if you scroll down a screen or two.