URL Autocomplete: Firefox vs. Chrome

Firefox 14 is now in the beta stage. It comes with several new features, click-to-play plugins, Google SSL search by default and so on. But it also comes with one seemingly minor tweak that will have a great effect on the workflow of any users, with those spending a lot of time in the browser being the most affected - autocomplete of typed URLs in the AwesomeBar.

Firefox has had suggestions for a very long time, but it now auto-fills the address bar field as you type with the URL that is the best match. It's a good addition, but the devil is in the details.

Google Chrome comes with the very same feature, autocomplete in the address bar. But the very subtle differences make Firefox's implementation a bit less useful.

The problem is that autocomplete suggestions can be quite annoying, especially when they're wrong. Even if they're not "wrong", i.e. they work as intended, they can still hurt usability rather than help it.

The Firefox team diverted from the way Google implemented the feature. In Chrome, the full URL of the most visited page that matches what you've typed so far is filled in.

In Firefox, only the domain name is filled in, not the entire URL, even if you generally visit a specific page and not the index.

For example, if you regularly use Google Reader, you would see www.google.com/reader autocompleted in Chrome when you started typing "google" but www.google.com in Firefox.

In some cases, you want the top domain name filled in, for example for a newspaper site; in some cases you want the full URL, if you're using a product on the subdomain and so on.

It's hard to determine which approach is the best since it depends a lot on personal choice and the sites you visit.

Where both browsers falter is with sub sections of a site. Both Firefox and Chrome give precedence to the letters to the left, i.e. if you type "r" they are both going to suggest websites that start with "r" or, bar that, those that have "r" very early in their domain name.

Even if you're a heavy Google Reader user and you've only visited a site that starts with "r" once or twice in months, the latter will be suggested.

There is a logic behind this, it would be very annoying if you started to type something and the first match would be some Facebook page that just happens to have the letters somewhere near the end of the URL in some randomly generated ID. Still, this could be fixed with a bit of algorithm wits.

Still, the feature can prove very useful in both browsers especially since you can remove suggestions to give the ranking algorithms a hand. Just select the suggestion you don't like and hit the "Delete" key to remove it or "Shift+Delete" to remove it permanently from the suggestions.

Another trick in Google Chrome is to press the "Ctrl" key to prioritize items from the history rather than bookmarks or search suggestions.

Finally, if you find the feature annoying, you can disable it in Firefox. Go to "about:config" search for browser.urlbar.autoFill and double-click it to set it to "false."

Via: URL Autocomplete: Firefox vs. Chrome