“Holy crap, you can do that?! You can do that! I’m going to be playing with this all day”
–custom dragged into the reply box to test this out…awesome! I love this! 
You can drag URL text to the awesome bar, and I often drag text into the Google Toolbar to search on, as it automatically adds quotes.
It’s been loading slowly for me, too. I thought it was too many add-ons (but I don’t have a lot) or my machine needing a defrag and houseclean. I am not nuts about Firefox 3. I hate the awesome bar.
Ooh… I didn’t know about dragging text, either. I did know about selecting text and right-clicking to search on that text.
There is an add-on called OldBar which will make it non-awesome – back to the previous version.
Or you can enter about:config in the location bar, go past the warning, and find & change the following settings:
- browser.urlbar.maxRichResults change default of 12 to 0.
- browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped change default of False to True
The latest - 3.0.10, with a bunch of add-ons. No hard drive grinding, either.
I’m wondering, for those of you who are having problems: how many programs do you have running, eating up memory? I’m not talking about applications, but the unnecessary garbage that gets installed along the way - such as Nvidia’s control panel, Photoshop’s file-finder thing (or whatever it is), etc.
Here’s an article that discusses some Firefox config options, including some that are supposed to speed it up: