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I remember this being the magical thing together with less wasted vertical space that made me switch to Chrome back in the day, it was (and still is) so simple!

I remember this being the magical thing together with less wasted vertical space that made me switch to Chrome back in the day, it was (and still is) so simple! Always had the search field taking up precious space in Firefox but never really using it because it was a different mental route, like this is smart but why am I not using it? I think it is down to having to consciously decide to search before starting to type instead of just start typing, if you couldn't remember the URL just misspell it and search and it works, a more specific page throw in another word and you get the correct page as a search result essentially every time.

ptx 6y ago
Looking at that issue of consciously deciding whether to search from another angle, if I haven't decided yet, why would I want to inform Google of what I'm typing? Perhaps it's a private address of a private server with private information in the query string. In any case, if I do decide to search, the search field is just a ctrl+k away, so the additional convenience of combining the fields never seemed that great to me. (But for Google, of course, it's a very convenient property of this design that everything the user types happens to end up being sent to Google.)