Firefox will automatically remove the Lab Kit add-on early next week to restore Firefox’s add-on update functionality and avoid potential stability and security problems.

The add-ons currently bundled in Lab Kit are still available individually. They’re all Mozilla Labs add-ons. Please post any questions to the Mozilla Labs group.

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Labs team

Separate toolbars before, combined OneLiner after

While the location bar functions as it did before, the search button activates an in-tab search by loading the default Firefox home page ready to search with Google. And just like when there were two separate boxes, the user has more control over when keystrokes get sent to a web search by requiring an explicit intent to search. For a future Firefox home page, the Prospector team plans to simplify searching with non-default search engines similar to the behavior on Firefox Mobile and Search Tabs.

Once you install OneLiner without restarting on Firefox, keep an eye out for some other features:

• the location bar expands to cover the back/forward buttons when not in use
• clicking the search button will pre-fill the search with selected text or clipboard data
• Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut instantly activates the in-tab search bar
• fullscreen mode keeps the one-line look that doesn’t get auto-hidden
• fullscreen “back” extends to the top and left edges of the screen for easy clicks

As always, you can check the source on Github, provide feedback, and submit issues or suggestions!

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

I’ve combined that colorful tab idea with the quick search idea from AwesomeBar HD. Now instead of showing the tabs when selecting text, Search Tabs detects when you’ve done a search from the search bar or triggered a default search from the location bar.

Pointing at a search tab to search “firefox” on Twitter

So just like in AwesomeBar HD, after doing a search, you can quickly try that same search with a different provider. And similar to how search engines typically let you switch to a particular category like images or videos, you can now switch to another provider with just one click. One main difference is that the search engines listed are the same ones in the search bar (as opposed to the hardcoded ones), so if you’ve added any custom search engines, all of them will be available as a search tab.

No longer are you limited to what the page happens to provide as alternative search options — you can take the full customization power of Firefox to pick where you want to search next.

Try out Search Tabs on Firefox! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think and submit issues or suggestions!

Add-on preferences in Firefox 7

If you’re already running Firefox 7, you’ll be able to customize behavior from the add-on page, otherwise you can find them in about:config under extensions.prospector.searchTabs.

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

Full-size video (0:52) download: webm (6mb) and ogv (5mb)

Transcript:

As part of the Prospector exploration, Twitter has worked with us to develop a new Firefox add-on, Twitter Address Bar Search, to explore ways to jump straight to the web page that you want. Along the same ideas behind AwesomeBar HD, instead of first doing a general web search, you can now easily focus on finding messages and users on Twitter.

If a billboard for Firefox mentions “@firefox”, I don’t need to bother typing in http://www. Instead, I just type @firefox directly into the address bar and hit enter. And I’m now ready to find out more about Firefox.

The add-on also allows me to instantly check up on what people are talking about for a #hashtag topic like #firefox. Or if I just want to search through Tweets, I can select Twitter for the search box. And if I’ve previously done a search in the Twitter app tab, it lights up to let me know that new Tweets are available.

Searching for a #hashtag from the address bar

You can try out Twitter Address Bar Search on Firefox 4 including Firefox for Android! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. You can also check out the official announcement on The Mozilla Blog.

We have a couple questions for you:

• Do you think showing @username as a keyword instead of urls will help users find websites?
• AwesomeBar HD uses category prefixes, e.g., “people:”, to trigger site-specific searches, and here we use “@” and “#”. Do you have suggestions for other ways to detect when not to do a general web search?

Let us know what you think and see what people are already tweeting about #firefoxtwitter. As usual, you can check out the code on GitHub and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

Full-size video (0:52) download: webm (8mb) and ogv (5mb)

Transcript:

LessChrome HD follows AwesomeBar HD in taking ideas from Home Dash and packaging them into a focused experiment. The core feature here is to give as much space to the page and only showing the browser interface when needed.

The default browsing behavior now is to only show tabs at the top of the window, and pointing there will reveal the rest of the browser. Moving the mouse cursor back down makes it go away.

We learned from Home Dash that people are excited about having an on-demand interface that shows navigation controls only when browsing to a new page. But users also wanted to see their tabs at any time to quickly pick one, so that’s why everything except tabs are hidden for now.

Another idea from Home Dash is to show page context when switching tabs. So when I switch to another tab, I can see where I am as a reminder before interacting with the page. Similarly, when switching to a secure tab, I can quickly see that the identity of the page has been verified.

More chrome before. Less after.

Try out LessChrome HD on Firefox 4! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think:

• Does the interface appear and hide when you want?
• Do you like seeing the page context (url and identity) when switching tabs?

As usual, you can check out the code on GitHub and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

Full-size video (0:50) downloads: webm (7mb) and ogv (4mb)

Transcript:

AwesomeBar HD provides categories in the location bar to help me find exactly what I want. Instead of having to first doing a generic web search and looking through the results, I can jump straight to tweets about beltzner. If I now wanted to check up on his work background, I can easily switch within the “people” category to LinkedIn.

This concept of using the same search query with a different web search isn’t new. Going to Google, we can see this similar functionality promoted along the left. And Bing has the same thing along the top.

But having this as part of Firefox allows you to pick the provider that you want. So if you prefer Flickr for pictures over the ones linked from the generic web search, you can activate it directly from the location bar.

Additionally, having this integrated with the browser can lead to a better user experience. If you’ve watched very carefully, you might have noticed that switching search results immediately loads the pages as Firefox has pre-fetched the results.

Easy switching of providers

Try out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think.

As usual, you can check out the recent fixes and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

Underlined blue categories

One initial problem was that people didn’t realize the category text in the location bar was clickable because it looked just like any other placeholder text — gray and faded. While the text would turn blue and get underlined when the user pointed the mouse at it, users didn’t think about pointing at the text. So now, on opening a new tab, each of the gray categories gets underlined and colored blue, and users immediately recognize they are links and clickable.

Showing clickable links

Hidden categories

Some users did find out that categories were clickable, but only by accident. They would try clicking in the location bar to type in something, but they actually end up clicking a category! Now clicking will always get an editable location bar. Clicking the url will keep the url around for editing while clicking in the whitespace will show an input box with no text ready to search. The categories are then shown when the location bar isn’t showing a url, e.g., when it’s empty on a new tab.

Showing what a click does

After making it clear that the categories were clickable, some users would click them and expect a page to load. So they sit around not realizing that there is some text on the left. As an initial aid, the add-on now hides the rest of the categories and animates the category text towards the left to hopefully indicate to the user that the location bar is waiting for something to be typed.

Animating the keyword to the left

Activating on click

Related to the previous issue, if a user has instead typed something first and then clicked a category, the user would have expected a page to load. What was actually happened was the category keyword text got inserted at the beginning of the input, and the add-on waited for the user to press enter or type more. Most likely if the user has already typed something, there won’t be a need to edit it when selecting a category, so the obvious thing to do is what the user wants — load the search result immediately!

Clicking the text box

Turns out a lot of people like clicking in the location bar. Some want to edit the url and others want to fix typos, but more importantly, they want to use the mouse to position the cursor as opposed to using the keyboard. There was some technical trickiness getting the category links to show up in-between the top layer of the input box (the text) and the bottom layer (background) because the input box is just one HTML element. This resulted in a fake text-box that didn’t act like a normal input box for clicks. We’re glad to report that starting with version 6, the input box is more normal and allows for the usual clicks — including right-clicking for copy/paste.

Customization

One common response from many of the users is the desire to customize the interface. And this is expected of Firefox users! The whole browser is customizable. So when the add-on comes pre-configured with a fixed list of categories and providers, users start looking for ways to remove some and add their own. We don’t have customization yet, but we know it’s an important feature that is also core to the Mozilla principles. However, the Prospector team is first interested in finding problems like those listed above so that people are able to discover and make use of AwesomeBar HD.

If you’ve previously tried out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4, please let us know on the forums if the new changes are better or not for you. You can also take a look at a list of changes in each of the previous versions and submit issues or suggestions on GitHub.

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

Early on, many users pointed out that the categories took up too much space in the location bar and would prefer more of the url to show. Since then, we’ve gotten rid of the “go to a website” link, hidden the url protocol (e.g., http://), and made sure the url path used up as much empty space as possible.

But the biggest gain in space for the url comes from not showing the categories by default (in addition to removal of the separate search bar). Now the categories only appear when a user starts navigating such as opening a new tab or clicking the location bar.

Secure website identity with full domain

There was also some concerns about phishing early on when short urls were being shown. AwesomeBar HD always made sure to display the full domain, but now the add-on emphasizes that fact by differently coloring the domain from the rest of the url. This combined with the identity block for sites using https should help users feel safer on the web.

Tab assist

Pressing tab in the location bar switches through the categories in either direction, but some users would never think of doing that and would be forced to always use the mouse to first pick a category. For now we’re trying out a little bubble that hopefully helps the user find out about this feature.

Keyword completion reminder

The bubble informs what’s coming up next so that users don’t need to look too far right and then all the way back left to see where they are going. Additionally it’ll highlight differently if the user types out the beginning of a keyword as a hint that no more typing is necessary.

If you’ve previously tried out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4, please let us know on the forums if the new changes are better or not for you. You can also take a look at a list of changes in each of the previous versions and submit issues or suggestions on GitHub.

- Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team

First off, a number of existing behaviors still work with the add-on enabled:

• Ctrl-L focuses the location bar with the url selected — ready to copy, edit or replace
• Ctrl-K pre-fills with “search: ” so you can search the web just like from the search bar
• Ctrl-T + tab opens a new tab and activates search (as if you tabbed to the search bar)

A note about first opening a new tab then pressing tab to search — any search (including category searches) will open the results in a new tab. But if you prefer to think about your search on an empty tab free from distractions of the previous page, this option is available for you. Also, for those curious, the search results are being pre-fetched, so hopefully by the time you press enter, the results page is ready for you to use.

One related side effect of defaulting to opening new tabs is that replacing pinned app tabs is a bit more difficult. You actually can’t change the url of an app tab with AwesomeBar HD installed because the url will open up in a new tab. So for now, you’ll have to remove the app tab or create a new one.

With so many tabs with different searches, AwesomeBar HD also makes sure to keep track of what you’ve typed (or didn’t type) in each of the tabs. So if you left some text in the location bar in one tab, it won’t stay there when you switch to another tab, and when you switch back, the test will be restored.

Activating categories with the keyboard

Highlighting 'books' for 'boo'

The initial version of AwesomeBar HD indicates what category can be activated by pressing tab, so if you type out the beginning of a category, e.g., “boo” for books, just press the tab key to activate. This blue highlighting behavior is a bit too subtle, so we’re looking into ways in better conveying this to you.

Search activated with tab

Notice that “boo:” is good enough to activate the books category (it turned green), so if you wanted, you could just type “b:” to get books as well.

Additionally, once you’ve got a category activated, you can continue to press tab to cycle through the other search providers within that category. So in this case, two presses of tab switches to Google Books from Amazon.com Books search. Next time you type “b:”, it’ll remember to use Google.

Try out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4, and leave feedback or submit issues or suggestions.

Full-size video (1:30) download: webm (17mb)

Transcript:

AwesomeBar HD spins-off from the Home Dash project to focus experiments on a combined location and search bar with a Mozilla twist. This means placing you, as a user, first and respecting your privacy, so unlike other browsers, the combined input will not send every letter you type to a remote server.

Instead, when you browse to a previously visited page, Firefox will only look through its local history without any network activity. The results come back in an order that looks at both how frequently and how recently you’ve been to the pages in addition to some adaptive learning for a bit of awesome.

When you do want to find pages from the rest of the internet, you can explicitly tell Firefox to search the web. You do this by first typing “search: ” into the location bar. Alternatively, instead of clicking on “Go to a website”, you can save some typing by directly clicking “search the web”, and you’re ready to search!

Many websites today provide specialized searches that focus on a particular category, and Firefox can now quickly get you to those rich search results by showing categories directly in the location bar. Now you can click “books” to find something to read, “movies” to watch or “references” to learn more about the open source browser made by a non-profit organization.

So far I’ve demoed clicking a category first then typing in a topic, but AwesomeBar HD supports several different ways to find what you want. You can instead type what you want first and then click a category. Or if you change your mind, you can click another one. Or if you don’t like the default, just select a different choice, and Firefox will remember that for next time.

Try out AwesomeBar HD on Firefox 4! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think:

• Are you able to easily browse to websites that you normally go to?
• Do you care that you can return to your history without someone else knowing?
• Does the category list of text and clicking behavior work for you?

Selecting a search category to find only books

For those that have been following along with Home Dash, we just passed the 3-month mark, and there’s already been 10 versions! One common issue though is because Home Dash changed the whole interface, people trying it out got confused pretty quickly, so the Prospector team has decided to spin off smaller experiments that focus on one aspect at a time. The first one we have is AwesomeBar HD.

As usual, you can check out the code on GitHub and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

- Ed Lee, aka Mr. AwesomeBar, on behalf of the Prospector team