Autocomplete Manager 1.6

Autocomplete Manager provides advanced features for the address Autocomplete component and includes fixes for location bar bugs, as well as a rudimentary history manager.
Thus, one can always fall back to the default Firefox behavior whenever desired. The purpose of the address Autocomplete component is to facilitate the fast retrieval of pages the user has visited in the past. All the options of the enhanced component implemented by this extension aim to achieve this goal.
In general, the component has the same look and feel, keyboard shortcuts and behavior as the default one in Mozilla Firefox. For example, common protocols (http://, https://, ftp://) and prefixes (www., ftp.) are ignored when matching. Autocomplete Manager will include an automatic update feature that enables Firefox to notify the user when there is a new extension version available.
Main features:
- searching bookmark addresses (matching bookmark entries are shown in italics on the Autocomplete popup to be distinguished from regular history matches), and matching against page titles and bookmark names. These two features have already been repeatedly requested by users (see this and this bug, and this MozillaZine thread). When both a history entry and a bookmark with the same address match, the history entry is removed from the suggestion popup to avoid duplicates.
- attempting to exclude local pages and pages containing search results. Pages on the local disk and addresses for search results usually clutter the suggestion popup without adding any real value, since searching the Web is nowadays so fast that users usually prefer to re-issue the search query than try to find the results page via Autocomplete. Thus, local pages and search result pages from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers.com, Bugzilla, Creative Commons, Ebay are currently eliminated on demand. If you are more technically inclined, the regular expression that is used for search pages is: /search?|external-search|search-handle-url|ntquery?|?q=|search.ebay.com|?query/i
- matching any part of the domain (a solution to this bug). For example, when typing ucla the entry www.cs.ucla.edu will be suggested. This helps in case the user remembers visiting an entitys website, but she doesnt remember the exact subdomain. For example, typing philips will suggest semiconductor.philips.com. In addition, by using this feature one can see all visited addresses for a top-level domain; for instance type edu to see all the academic institution addresses you have visited.
- changing the sorting criterion. This is of the utmost importance, since it determines where in the suggestion popup an entry appears. Firefox gives preference to most-often-visited entries, along with some heuristics to increase the ranking of Web directories and manually-typed addresses. To get a better idea about the decisions that went into the current design of the default Autocomplete component, see here. The Autocomplete Manager, on the other hand, provides five alternatives: the default Firefox ordering, alphabetically by address, most-often-visited first, most-recently-visited first, and top-level pages first. The last option makes top-level addresses, such as www.google.com appear at the top of the popup, before any lower-level addresses, such as www.google.com/scholar (see here for some more thoughts on this issue). This might be useful when trying to quickly jump to the main address of a Web site; for instance, I often want to visit www.slashdot.org and I dont really care about any individual pages under that domain.
- specifying the position of bookmarks. Bookmarks can be either sorted regularly, according to the criterion in use, or they can be placed at the top of the suggestion list. This would be useful for someone who uses the extension to recall her bookmarks without having to go looking through all the folders in the Bookmark Manager.
- re-sorting the suggestion list on the fly, according to any criterion, by using the key combination Ctrl+ . For example, Ctrl+1 will re-sort the list according to Firefox default, Ctrl+2 alphabetically by address, and so on.
- temporarily disabling the popup, by pressing Shift+L to focus on the location bar and type in an address without a popup showing up. Autocomplete is re-enabled after pressing Enter, Esc, or the down arrow. For instance, you would use that when you know the exact address you want to type, and you do not want to be distracted by the popup. You can also set an option to only show the popup on demand, by pressing the down arrow.
- opening a suggestion in a new tab by middle-clicking on it (fix for this bug).
- popup appearance fine-tuning. In addition to the extra functionality features, several appearance knobs for the suggestion popup are provided. One can show/hide page titles or bookmark names, show/hide the source (history or bookmarks) and the visit count of an entry on a separate column on the popup, and customize the size of the popup by defining the number of visible suggestions. One can also choose to have the best match completed inline (fixing the broken inline autocomplete in Firefox 2), filling the location bar with the address of the best match, or even its title, if that was what triggered the match, just like Internet Explorer does for top-level favorites. Lastly, one can define the truncation method for the page address and page title columns. This last feature is an interesting one. By default, Firefox truncates a long address on the right. The Autocomplete Manager enables you to have a long entry truncated at the center, so that you can see both its domain name at the beginning and the specific page address at the end. Simple, but extremely useful! You also have the option of truncating entries on the left, although the reason someone would want to do that is beyond me :) This research paper has a good discussion of the different truncation methods and their effectiveness in helping users recognize previously-visited Web pages.
- exposing hidden options for the default component, not all of which can be set in about:config. These include showing/hiding the page titles, matching only manually-typed (as opposed to clicked-on) addresses, completing the best match inline, and setting the number of visible suggestions on the popup.
- a rudimentary history manager, where one can view detailed information for all history entries, and sort them by address or title. One can also add new entries manually, or select multiple entries and remove them (fixing this bug).
Enhancements:
- implemented major performance improvements when matching entries and in the history manager
- added new option to only show the popup when pressing the down arrow
- augmented inline autocomplete to fill the title of the best match, instead of the address, if that was what triggered the match
- Shift+L now temporarily disables popup even when the focus is on the location bar; down arrow re-enables it
- one-letter searches and www./ftp. ones are now properly sorted like other searches
- fixed bug that caused problems when the Options dialog was launched from the Extension Manager
- fixed bug that caused conflict with the McAfee SiteAdvisor extension
- added workaround for a Firefox bug that prevented displaying the popup the first time a match was attempted (Mac OS X only)