Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game.
For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.
That's like saying that before writing a blog post, one should consult a psychologist to research every word's implications on human readers.
If you have a multi-billion dollar budget to test every pixel of the user interface then fine, but what if you're an indie developer and have to do with a budget of $100?
The "cheep" way to do A / B testing is for B to always be the existing system. Roll out changes to 10% of your users and see how they respond. Just remember if your users hate it then fix the problem and test it again or abandon the idea. So, this only works when you can measure how they resound to changes.
Allow for the change to bed in. When the awesome bar came out I immediately disliked it, possibly hated it even: now I find it both useful and generally awesome. It [the awesome bar] takes time to learn the best response to each key string, now i rarely need to type more than 3 letters to find the address i want, often just one letter.
Also a UI change can get more plaudits by virtue of the placebo effect, IMO (I've not done double blind tests!), making things appear better simply cause the look has changed.
firefox 3's location bar is a mess, not just because of this issue. It will suggest me a gmail authentication string for almost all of my inputs. There are lots of ways to do this better. I like chromes way of doing it, but it has some privacy issues.
If you select a different entry then that entry gets promoted next time you type the same string. So if you type "g" and a gmail address comes up but you cursor down to "engadget" (say) then next time you press "g" engadget is more likely to come up. After a few iterations g will bring up engadget as the first selection. It's awesome!
I wrote a proposal for an extension that could passively solve the porn+awesomebar problem in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the ad blocking problem. Since I am not a coder, I can’t whip up an alpha proof of concept, but perhaps someone else can take a crack at it. (I pitched it to Wladimir Palant a while back, but he wasn’t interested).
Porn is that important to that many??? Just use the google search to go to such websites! The people they are trying to hide it from obviously are not tech savvy and won't know what cache is or where to find it.
go to about:config, set places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus to 0. Then use private browsing when you visit those "secret" links.
The page on browser.urlbar.richResults says: "Has an effect in * Mozilla Firefox (nightly builds from 2007-11-29 to 2007-12-17)"
So I guess you need to do what it says under "Background" to get rid of the awesome bar: "If you’d like to disable the improved Location Bar dropdown in a version of Firefox without this preference, try the oldbar extension."
This article is about the awesomebar exposing bookmarks that previously were only accessible through navigating deep folder hierarchies. Porn mode has nothing to do with this. Read the article.
Saying it has "nothing" to do with it is a bit extreme. What if "porn mode" (private browsing) were implemented as a password protected sub-session that allowed bookmarks to be saved, cookies kept, etc., but insulated from the standard browser use with files saved in an encrypted folder.
That would also allow for a person to masquerade more easily as different users.
Indeed private browsing mode could be another, hidden, user profile that happens to have encryption - if a username:password is supplied then the session is saved, if not then it's deleted on browser close.
Porn mode has everything to do with this - yes, they're separate features, but they relate strongly to each other. Private Browsing avoids saving visited sites to history, which includes stopping them from appearing in the Awesomebar.
Between 3.0 and 3.5, there was Awesomebar but no Private Browsing. So when you typed 'g' to start 'gmail.com', it might have shown 'Naked Black Girls', which appeared in your history because there was no private browsing and you forgot to manually clear the cache.
The ideal would have been to introduce Private Browsing and Awesomebar at the same time, to handle this situations.
