Opera’s New Address Bar Suggestions Face Criticism

Opera, in the most recent stable version of the web browser, and also in the latest snapshot build, has made changes to the browser’s address bar suggestion feature. This feature basically handles the suggestions the browser displays when the user begins to type in the address bar. Users in the Opera forum were the first to spot the differences. Two aspects that got criticized heavily were the reduced number of entries from bookmarks and history, and the drop of interactivity features like middle-clicking to open a result in a new browser tab.

Opera today has announced that improvements are also coming to Opera 12.00, the next version of the browser that is currently under development. The old system, according to Daniel Aleksandersen, matched the terms the user entered against the page url, title or page content and ordered them by last visit.

Opera’s new system assigns a score to each suggestion that is based on additional factors like the position of the term in the url, the number of matches or the position or if the match is a bookmark.

The feature is still in development, as Opera is still working on integrating the browser’s Speed Dial feature and improving the scoring algorithm further.

Suggestions seem to favor search heavily in the current build, which has been one of the points of criticism. Another that it is now more difficulty to distinguish between sources, that site identification has become more difficulty as favicons have been removed, and that it sometimes is not clear why a page has been added to the suggestions.

In my own tests, I was unable to get suggestions if the entered phase did not start at the beginning of the url. The term hack for instance did not list lifehacker or ghacks in the suggestions.

It is my opinion a step in the wrong direction. Keep in mind though that this is not final and may see improvements in future builds. You can download the latest Opera Next version from the Opera Desktop Team blog.

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UI Enhancer Improves Firefox’s Address Bar Behavior

There is not really a lot that you can do with Firefox’s address bar, other than entering keywords or web addresses. A click on the site’s favicon opens a window with security related information about the site and the bookmark’s star at the end offers to bookmark the site.

UI Enhancer improves the Firefox address bar in several ways. It first turns each web address into a breadcrumb navigation. A click on one of the crumbs opens that part of the page right in the active tab. That’s not new, and multiple Firefox add-ons like like Location Bar 2 have offered a similar feature for some time now.

What makes this special is the ability to display the last 15 pages for each subfolder. This is done by moving the mouse cursor over the folder to highlight it and clicking the right mouse button afterwards.

You can alternatively left-click when one of the breadcrumbs is only partially highlighted. The menu that is opening up displays additional options.

Edit: Allows you to edit the highlighted part of the address.Add: Allows you to add something to the highlighted part of the address.Copy: Copies the url, but cuts everything off that begins after the selected part.Copy all: Copies the web address to the clipboadDelete: Cuts everything after the highlighted part of the address and loads the result.

You can furthermore use the scroll wheel to instantly display related urls in the address bar which you can then access with a click.

The extension supports middle mouse button clicks and Ctrl-clicking wherever possible so that pages are loaded in new tabs instead of the active tab.

The add-on comes with its own stylesheet, and options to load a custom stylesheet instead which may be interesting for users who know their CSS and prefer a different design and layout.

The Bookmarks Enhancer that the add-on ships with is disabled by default. This basically auto-hides the bookmarks toolbar and displays it only when you move the mouse over into the header area of the browser.

Firefox users who like the feature set of UI Enhancer can download the extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The most useful feature without doubt is the ability to display a history for each subfolder of a domain you are currently on. This can speed up site navigation and access of information considerable.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday January 25, 2012 -
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Minimap Sidebar, Address Lookup, Directions The Easy Way

Many Internet users use the Internet to lookup addresses or get driving directions. They usually open a maps service, such as Google Maps or Bing Maps for that. It often means juggling around with multiple websites, if they have found the address on another website.
A simple example is a new shop that you just discovered in your home town that is listing an address but not a map on the shop website. Another that you are scouting places for your next trip to Europe and want to find out how far off they are from the hotel you are staying in.

Minimap Sidebar is a Firefox extension with a rich feature set. The extension displays a map in the browser’s sidebar by default which you can use to lookup addresses effortlessly. All it takes is to drag and drop the address into the minimap to have the add-on center on that location on the map.

The map behaves exactly as you would expect it to. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out, hold down the mouse to move around on the map or use controls at the top of the sidebar window to change the map type, toggle traffic information or to add location information manually to the map.

Even better, places are saved automatically so that you can switch through all of them in a heartbeat. That’s useful for Internet users who often need to lookup addresses on map services such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Open Street Map or other services, and those who are creating a list of places to visit.

Minimap Sidebar uses Google Maps by default, with options to switch to Open Street Map instead. Locations can also be opened in tabs or as an overlay preview right on the page the address is displayed on.

And if you do not have an address that you can copy and paste, you can alternatively type in address information manually for the exact same functionality. Once an address has been located on the map, you can open one or multiple services in tabs for more information about the address. Supported services include Google Earth, Flickr, Panoramio or loc.alize.us.

What is more, you can set a home address to speed up retrieving driving information to other locations you have added to the extension.

Export options allow you to export the location as KML, CSV, GPX or minimap files, get a location’s geohash link or latitude and longitude, or search for the place on Amazon, ebay, Maps.com or upcoming.com (events).

The extension supports geo tagging, which means that it will automatically discover if a website you visit supports the technology.

Minimap Sidebar is a useful extension for Internet users who need to lookup addresses or get directions regularly. Instead of having to open a maps website next to the current website, they can now handle everything in one browser window.

Firefox users can download and install the Minimap Sidebar extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

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Move Firefox Tabs To The Sidebar About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday January 12, 2012 -
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How To Verify If An E-mail Address Exists

Sometimes you may want to make sure that an e-mail address exists before you start sending out messages to that address. While you could simply send a test message to the address and see if it bounces off the mail server, you’d may want to try a sneakier solution so that the recipient does not know about it. It should be clear that the recipient will receive the test message if the e-mail address exist.

Before we look at a tool that allows you to verify e-mail addresses, we should for a moment look at reasons for verifying addresses. A common reason is a mailing list that you want to clean up, another if you can only remember part of the e-mail address and not all of it.

EToolz is a free portable program for the Windows operating system that can verify if e-mail addresses exist. While it does not work for all messages, it works fine for many including Google E-Mail addresses (Gmail that is), and not for others like Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Switch to the Mail-Check tab of the program once you have started it. Here you need to key in the e-mail address you want to test, and optionally sender and server information as well as a timeout for the connection.

Click the start button once you have entered and modified all parameters to your liking. The program will then try to establish a connection with the selected e-mail address which may or may not work. Gmail will for instance let you know if sender and recipient are accepted. Even better, you will sometimes get information why it is not accepted, for instance if the email account is over quota like in the example on the screenshot above.

Not being able to test multiple e-mail addresses at once is one of the downsides of the program. You can download it from the developer website. Please note that the initial interface language is set to German. Click on Extras > Sprache / Language to change it to English or another of the supported languages.

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