I design a popular browser for a living, and I also liked breadcrumbs enough to write up this quick hack back in 2003: http://bodytag.org/crumbler/ http://bodyt

I design a popular browser for a living, and I also liked breadcrumbs enough to write up this quick hack back in 2003: http://bodytag.org/crumbler/ http://bodytag.org/crumbler/ Here are a jumble of quick thoughts, please don't take them as the opinion of the team: 1. The reason we didn't pursue anything like this is because sites are easily capable of doing it themselves in their own UI - the URL bar itself needs to come with expected behaviors, and when sites are able to overload it, it becomes more unpredictable. Standardized web UI has been a dream for many years, but the chaotic cacophony of the web is where all the beauty and innovation lies. Though it's a long way from the old ideals of User Agents, a modern browser's job is to get out of the way. 2. Windows Explorer is also able to get away with this style of UI because most people rarely type anything in that field; in the case of the browser, people are typing things in there all the time. Conflating menu-based and text-based navigation is hard. 3. Even though people are generally familiar with the structure of their own filesystem, navigating through it using the breadcrumb-menu interface is somewhat foreign - people don't like to think about sibling pages, especially for pages elsewhere in the stack. This becomes worse when you're dealing with random websites, where you don't know the layout of each. 4. Many websites don't map to a standardized navigation - products can exist in multiple categories, and sites like Wikipedia completely mess with the notion of tree-based structures. Building a notion of site structure into the browser was too prescriptive (see rant at end of point 1).