Advanced Locationbar for Firefox

Firefox is famous for its extensibility for a reason, because it allows extension authors to modify any part of their interface to implement the most daring ideas. But such flexibility has a serious drawback - one careless move can easily break the browser.

Locationbar² perfectly demonstrates this. This extension adds to the standard address bar the ability to simply click on the desired segment of the URL to go up several levels up the structure of the site, and this "magic" behavior is activated only if you move the mouse cursor from left to right of the connection type icon (you can consider this as a gesture) or when you press Ctrl / Alt / Shift. However, besides this useful change, as it turned out, Locationbar² breaks the operability of IDN domains - they are displayed in encoded form, and the subdomain is completely discarded. The extension has not been finalized since 2011, over time, there have been minor conflicts with new versions of Firefox, and the author of the extension does not get in touch.

It's time to fork: meet the Advanced Locationbar!

How it was?

In fact, I fixed the problem with IDN back in 2012, but since then, further improvements were somewhere in a long box. During this time, a new fork of this extension with the name Locationbar³ managed to appear, which, without looking at the name, was a slightly lite version of Locationbar² with cut out optional (and in my opinion superfluous) functions that conflicted with new versions of Firefox. However, neither problems with IDN nor other shortcomings were resolved. For this reason, I combined my improvements with lightweight code and took up further work. After all, this is the whole power of open source!

What happened?

• IDN support has been added, now such domains are displayed correctly, and subdomains are not cropped
• Now you can switch to a domain or subdomain separately (for example, you can go directly from blog.mozilla.org to mozilla.org)
• If the cursor leaves the address bar for a fraction of a second, the segment selection mode will not be reset, so you can move the mouse cursor not very carefully
• Converting to links by pressing Ctrl / Alt / Shift or by moving the mouse cursor from the icon can be turned off
• Options are integrated into the standard extension manager
• Ellipsis does not appear when it is not needed (error in Locationbar²)
• Improved support for Firefox 32+ (based on Locationbar³ with some bug fixes)
• New icon and name :)
• Project repository available on BitBucket

What's next?

I’m already very used to such pleasant things in Firefox, and since other browsers do not allow me to interfere with my interface in this way, I simply won’t survive the browser change. So I have to keep this extension up to date :) I have no purpose to make a combine from this extension for all occasions. For the future, only a few small pleasant features and a smarter gesture processing are planned when the user intends to select a segment.

I would be glad if this extension is useful to you. Thanks for attention.