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So you downloaded Firefox 3, installed it and hoped that this time you won't get any unexpected UI changes which would break your browsing habits?

Bzzzt! Wrong!

Obviously those morons from Mozilla Foundation haven't read my previous rant where I explained what kind of UI changes should be avoided at all costs.

So you start the Firefox 3 and start typing an URL and BANG! Enter AwesomeBar... AwesomeWhat? Bar! Like you know, location bar? Riiight... but what is so awesome about it? Nothing — they completely and utterly destroyed the old location (a.k.a. address) bar functionality.

Of course they again did what I told them not to do — they made this new, broken design a new default. They also did the other thing I explicitly told them not to do — they haven't provided an easily accessible way to revert to the old behavior.

If you are thinking that I am the only one bitching about it, check here to see how many users are happy with this UI change that has been forced down our throats.

At the time of this writing, there was no way to completely revert to the old location bar behavior, there are tweaks but unfortunately the search algorithm cannot be tweaked in this way.

One really has to wonder whose bright idea was to include bookmarks in the search results? If I had it bookmarked I would have clicked it, not searched for it!

I sincerely hope there will soon be an interim release (like 3.01 or something) which will lose this "awesomeness" as default and provide an option in preferences to chose the new behavior over the old one. That is actually how it should have been done in the first place.