This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by dion. Original Post: URL Bar Navigator Firefox Extension Feed Title: techno.blog(Dion) Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dion Feed Description: blogging about life the universe and everything tech Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by dion Latest Posts From techno.blog(Dion)

I did a typical rant about the URL bar auto- suggest in Firefox, and how it can be annoying when you are in the use case of "most common" and it is throwing up "most recent".

The beauty of being in our profession, and having a tool that is scriptable and extensible, is that you can do something about it.

Firefox also makes it simple, because you can get access to the URL bar via:

document.getElementById("urlbar"); // aliased via gUrlBar in many contexts

I wrote the URL Bar Navigator plugin to do what I needed. A simple Control + Left Arrow narrows the scope of a URL that I am on to just the root domain, and I am enjoying it already.

Kudos to the Mozilla team for making life so easy. It isn't without warts though. There are many resources on building Firefox extensions, but it is hard to grok which are out of date (FF 2.0 happy). The system is flexible, so you run into the ant-vs-maven problem of "hmm, should I create a chrome directory to put the overlay in? or should I just put it up here". The extension extension helped a little, but it was buggy for me on Mac OS X. Many of the scripts didn't work on OS X too.