Year of the Code Monkey

I’ve been doing some thinking recently about how I want to move forward with Googlebar Lite. The toolbar feels feature complete to me at this point, but there are a few improvements that I would like to eventually make. Here now is a listing of the things I think need improvement. Feel free to comment on any of these items (or suggest your own):

1. Improved Search History: The way Googlebar Lite handles search history is a bit of a hack. I’d like to implement a true “auto-complete” search history, similar to the URL bar in Firefox. In the process, I think the actual XUL control for the search box will change. Which will hopefully improve point #2.
2. Improved Skin Consistency: A number of users have complained that the toolbar is too tall in some themes (which is true). The majority of these cases are a direct result of the theme in question (not Googlebar Lite), but I do want to improve the consistency of the toolbar’s look. I think by going to an actual edit control (instead of the menu list I currently use), I may be able to solve some of these problems. This problem is especially apparent in Linux.
3. Better Highlighting: The search term highlighting feature currently causes problems with text in edit controls. I want to get rid of this problem, minimizing the impact on performance in the process (which is looking very tricky).

Several people have also suggested that I include some sort of toolbar toggle, so that the Googlebar Lite toolbar can be hidden or shown. This particular feature seems redundant to me (the View » Toolbars menu already allows you to do this), but I can understand adding a keyboard shortcut for this function. Whether or not this should be included in a future build is still up in the air.

What other suggestions do you have? I’m certain that there is room for improvement in Googlebar Lite, so let me know what you think. Keep in mind that the goal of this project is to minimize bloat (I’m not trying to recreate the Googlebar). As such, I prefer suggestions that have a minimal impact on the toolbar’s weight.

One Response

1. 1

   Florian
   December 17, 2005 at 4:49 am

    

   I agree with you that Googlebar lite is kind of feature complete now!
   It’s really cool and working with it makes life a lot easier!

   I also agree with you that the XUL control for the search box is not 100% of what it could be…
   The look&feel has some disadvantages: When you open the Box for choosing an item an decide to type it in manually instead you can not really type something in… This behavior can hopefully be improved with a better control…

   Keep it up!

   Florian