The not so awesome bar

I was very excited when the awesome bar was introduced in firefox 3.0, I thought that it will change the way I use my browser – no more automatic googling for sites in which I have been rarely before, but rather first doing a local search in the browser history which at least should be faster.

I was right. The knowledge of the existence of the awesomebar have actually changed the way I use the browser. I no more attempt to guess the initial character in the name of the site but rather some part of it, or an outstanding word in the title. On the other hand, the awesome bar caused me a lot of misery every time I have misspelled something which had no match in the history DB as it would practically freeze the input to the address bar while it was conducting its useless search.

FF 3.5.2 have changed things to the better, as even when there was no match the perceived responsiveness have improved*, but now mozilla guys have publicized an hack which improves the performance of the awesome bar by essentially optimizing its DB. This shows a really sloppy coding practizes by mozilla. If you are going to use a DB embedded in your product, you better have someone how understands the pitfalls of using such a DB. The obvious pitfall in this case is that from time to time the DB has to be optimized in order to have fast responses from the DB, which means in the embedded DB case, that the embedding software have to do the cleanup automatically.

I have read some excuses about the optimization taking long time in which the GUI is frozen, but those are mere excuses as the optimization can be moved to the background as most of the time the browser is just seating idle, or to the startup or shutdown parts of the code. In the worst case FF should at least try to use some heuristic to calculate if an optimization is required and prompt the user that it is about to run one. I find it hard to believe that anyone will complain if this will happen once in two months as upgrades to new dot releases are being pushed in a higher frequency (and maybe it should be combined?) and I haven’t heard any complains about that.

* As a side note, I think that with FF 3.5 mozilla got away without getting the amount of criticism that a commercial company would get for releasing an uncomplete product. 3.5.2 solved a major usability bugs of the awesome bar and the startup time, bugs which were surly known at the time 3.5 was developed but waited another two “dot” releases to be at least partially fixed.