Address toolbar in XP SP3
Posted by: admin in Windows
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I just switched my main work computer to the Windows XP SP3 beta as it seems stable to me and have still run into the problem of the Address toolbar not working still.
One of the issues that Microsoft has is that part of the anti trust trials that they have gone thorough stated that this address bar restricts users to Internet Explorer, I use Firefox as my default eweb browser and clearly this is not true, anyway I digress let’s fix it instead!
Many people may not use the address toolbar in Windows XP but I certainly do. What this toolbar does is allow you to type in a command or a web address and it will launch your default web browser with that page. The Windows address bar sits in your taskbar so it is always there and easy to get to.
I was wondering if this functionality could be put back into Windows XP SP3 so I searched around and found a shell replacement by a company called Muvenum and is an address toolbar replacement.
There are a few notes about how this toolbar works:
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The dropdown button currently doesn’t show anything when clicked (empty).
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The combobox supports autocompletion using IE History like the normal address bar.
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The url opens in your default browser. (*seems like they could change it to do this and beat the “legal restrictions”, but as the one above says, it currently only pulls from the IE History. I’ll look into pulling from FireFox if enough people ask for it.)
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If you type a single word it appends “http://” to the beginning.
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If you type multiple words with a space, it opens google search with the words as the search query.
This toolbar seems to do exactly what I had before and works perfectly. If you are doing your own beta testing on Service Pack 3 of Windows XP then it definitly does not hurt to try this toolbar addon to Windows
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To get back the address toolbar, simply replace browseui.dll in your windows/system32 folder with a pre-SP3 version. The easiest way is to use Start->Run->msconfig->Expand File and get a copy of the file from your (pre-SP3) windows disc.
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Wow that is a great tip, thanks so much for sharing. I will do that on my next SP3 install
Bill
It takes a little more work than is suggested here. You can not simply overwrite the browseui.dll file as it is constantly in use by Windows. You will first need to boot into safe mode and kill the explorer process. Even then, Windows will automatically replace the browseui.dll file on reboot with the SP3 version from a backup it has. To do it right, you have to replace browseui.dll in several locations. See this post for more info: http://personal.ryantadams.com/2008/05/08/restore-the-address-bar-in-windows-xp-sp3/
Another alternative is Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar at http://www.dqsd.net/ . This does various things as well as being a pretty competent address bar. One thing missing, as far as I can tell, is history of addresses, but there are other nice features.