Ability to remove www.*.com shortcut
 

One of my most looked at sites is the BBC News website, which is at the address [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk[/url]. However, with OmniWeb, typing in "news" to the address bar automatically brings up [url]http://www.news.com[/url] as the first link, thanks to the shortcut that has been setup to do this, which seemingly cannot be removed.

Any chance you could trust your users enough to give them the option to remove this shortcut? Asides from anything else, it's a bit US/BigCommerce centric - it overrides history entries for [url]http://www.news.co.nz[/url], for example.

I'm fully prepared to tick a little disclaimer box that says I understand that I may actually have to type full URLs into the address field instead of just throwing random words into there and hoping. ;-)

The * is only going to be the first match in the URL autocomplete drop down. You should see entries from your bookmarks and history below it.

You can customize what the shortcut does in the shortcuts preference pane, if you'd prefer it used a different google site or another search engine all together you can change it in there, you just can't delete it completely.

You can easily create a shortcut so that typing "news" goes right to the bbc page

[IMG]http://img.skitch.com/20090527-mp7imxtwmbf2whkmf1j52frc55.jpg[/IMG]

Or just save it as a bookmark and add "news" to the keyword field.

Hmm, not sure this isn't a bug rather than a feature request.

If I click on the "-" (which is set as enabled) to remove the [url]www.*.com[/url] shortcut, nothing happens - no error or beep. But if I edit the shortcut content to blank all fields and [b]then[/b] click on the minus, it gets rid of the shortcut!

Not sure why the "-" was enabled if I couldn't remove the entry, and not sure why blanking the entry would make removal work, but never mind - I have the result I wanted.

I still think this is a valid bug/feature request - yes, you can develop workarounds, but it's still pretty presumptuous to push users towards .com domains and not give them the ability to easily rectify this (whether this is due to a bug or design decision).

As I said before, this meant that a .com site I have no desire to visit would appear in autocomplete before a .org or .co.uk site with the same name that I visit regularly, which makes it extra effort to view anything outside the US-centred Big Money internet sites.

Oh right, I was actually overlooking the default behavior for this setting. I'd forgotten that it just tacked on a www and .com to whatever you type in.

We do plan to improve this behavior in the future.

You're going to continue to have trouble with it unfortunately, it will be created again when you relaunch.

I personally have that shortcut do an I'm feeling lucky google search which is more inline with what other browsers do.

[QUOTE=Whomper;60445]Not sure why the "-" was enabled if I couldn't remove the entry, and not sure why blanking the entry would make removal work, but never mind - I have the result I wanted.[/QUOTE]

Hmm, that does sound like a bug; if you do manage to remove it altogether, OmniWeb will restore it on your next launch.

Rather than removing it, you might try changing it to point at "http://%@/" if you don't want OmniWeb to automatically add the "www." prefix and ".com" suffix. OmniWeb doesn't require that you have any particular setting for the default shortcut, it just requires that you have a default shortcut of some sort.

[QUOTE=Ken Case;60458]OmniWeb doesn't require that you have any particular setting for the default shortcut, it just requires that you have a default shortcut of some sort.[/QUOTE]

P.S. — As Troy mentioned, some people here at Omni use a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search as their default shortcut, like so:

[CODE]http://www.google.com/search?btnI=1&q=%@[/CODE]

[QUOTE=Ken Case;60458]Rather than removing it, you might try changing it to point at "http://%@/" if you don't want OmniWeb to automatically add the "www." prefix and ".com" suffix.[/QUOTE]

Ah, that's done the trick. Cheers! Glad to hear it's under review for the eventual Omniweb 6. This is better support than I get with most of my paid products!

Thanks for making a great browser, and for making it free. Also, thanks for OmniFocus - I'd never have actually got around to posting a bug report without it.