FF3 autocomplete explained [FWD]

for those of you who haven't heard, marco zehe is now the accessibility
testing and UI QA lead for firefox

---------- Forwarded Message -----------
From: Marco Zehe <mzehe@mozilla.com>
To: dev-accessibility@lists.mozilla.org
Sent: Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:06:01 +0100
Subject: Re: FF3 autocomplete control/configuration inquiry

Hi Gregory,

let me explain a bit about how the new AutoComplete feature works in
Firefox 3. Perhaps that will make the behaviour you're seeing a bit more
understandable.

The AutoComplete feature on the Location bar now matches URIs as well as
page titles as soon as you start typing something. The AutoComplete will
pop up showing you the first match it finds with the text you typed.
This means, the more you type, the better the match you're getting. With
the newest addition of the AutoComplete feature, which landed in the
11/30 trunk build, you also are told whether the URL/page found is a
bookmark you already created earlier, or if it has any tags you may have
added etc.
Since the 12/05 build, which is what you quoted originally, this
information is also fully accessible by JAWS. So if you typed "mozilla"
in your location bar, you can then hit DownArrow to select the first
match it found. It will give you the page title first, followed by the 
URL.

However, if you want to dismiss the popup and continue typing in the
location bar without it trying to find a match, you can hit ESCAPE, and
the popup is closed, and all you typed will be still intact. However, as
soon as it finds a new match, the popup will reappear.

I use the AutoComplete tohelp me fill out Bonsai queries (giving me
checkins of a given period). I simply type "bonsai" into the location
bar, hit DownArrow and get the last bonsai query I visited. I then hit
Escape to drop out of the popup, but with the bonsai query intact in the
location bar, right there for me to edit min and maxdate values to my
liking. I then hit enter, and there is my new query. Very convenient.

BTW: We are thinking about stripping the http://, and possibly www
portions of the URL in the AutoComplete list, because it takes so long
for speech synths to speak that (in English it's even longer than in
German, which is my mother tongue).

I hope this helps clarify the workings of the new AutoComplete feature.

As for your question:

>>> speaking of SeaMonkey, aaron and marco, will FF3 replace 
>>> navigator in SeaMonkey when FF3 ships?

SeaMonkey is independently developed from Firefox. I just asked your
question on the #seamonkey IRC channel, and this is the  bottom line of
what they told me: While all features of the Gecko 1.9 backend will be
available in both products, including all of the accessibility
enhancements, this does not mean that Navigator in SeaMonkey 2.0, and
Firefox 3.0 will match feature for feature. So it is very possible that
dialogs look different or some things are handled in a different fashion.

To get more specifics on what they plan on introducing in SeaMonkey 2.0,
I suggest asking them directly.

Marco

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Received on Thursday, 6 December 2007 16:02:47 UTC