The Firefox 3 so-called 'Awesomebar' address bar is one serious step in the wrong direction if you ask me.

Some folks seem to love it but to me, when it autocompletes, it shows anything but the page address you expect it to. It tries to be 'helpful' by adding in algorithmically-searched addresses from your bookmarks and godknows where else which wouldn't be so bad, except that it does so at the expense of the typed-url history items you expect to come up - and limits the results to a small number.

There's an addon called 'oldbar' which helps to a degree by changing the appearance back to that of Firefox 2, but it's not really a full solution because the actual URLs that are presented in the drop-down when you begin to type an address, are the same ones as FF3 would normally present anyway.

It does *look* whole lot less ugly though:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Hopefully the firefox developers might come up with an option to allow old fogeys to continue using the far superior Firefox 2 address bar algo. Otherwise looks from a few google searches like they're going to lose a fair wedge of their existing fanbase in a headlong rush for 'progress' 

Nearest car-related analogy I can think of is if someone decided to 'improve' the steering wheel by making it square and fitting it in the boot.