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This is because Google and Microsoft have confused the users by allowing them to type whatever into wherever and they just figure it out. Some would call that g

This is because Google and Microsoft have confused the users by allowing them to type whatever into wherever and they just figure it out. Some would call that good UI - probably myself included - but it teaches bad behavior and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are.

mfext 5y ago
Actually it was Mozilla
- nathancahill 5y ago
  Firefox 3. The "AwesomeBar". https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-awesome-about-firefox-3/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-aweso... Looking at those old screenshots shows me how much the current autocomplete has regressed. The suggestions used to be so much better since it was a literal text search across titles and URLs. I remember you could configure how many results were displayed, I always set it to the max. The 2-line rich display was awesome for scanning URLs too. The "URL after the title" we have now makes it impossible to do that. Edit: Fixed most of these annoyances with this: https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
  - lowlevel 5y ago
    I think this is because AwesomeBar had a design goal of helping end users instead of total global search domination. Just a hunch.
londons_explore 5y ago
If you paste a link into the google search box, a good fraction of the time it doesn't lead you on a path to arriving at that link. For example, try the URL of this page. For me, zero results.
- phkahler 5y ago
  Using the search box on Google. If you put search terms in the URL bar on Chrome you'll get search results.
- jpindar 5y ago
  For me it gave one result - this page.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    People trying to search it likely raised its indexing priority.
- rchaud 5y ago
  The URL of this page probably hasn't been indexed yet as it was created today. It also doesn't include any identifiable strings of text, just a page ID number.
londons_explore 5y ago
In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  I don't think this is good example, choke valve just doesn't exist on any "modern" car.
  - soylentcola 5y ago
    Yeah, I only know about it from using other carbureted things (lawnmower, generator, motorcycle, etc.) If I'd only ever started up a modern car, I probably wouldn't know about it either.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  This is a good analogy. Quite frequently I think "if only more companies did a better job at educating users instead of dumbing things down." But then I remember a lot of users don't want to be educated about things they're not interested in. They just want things to work so they can move on to whatever else they have going on in their lives.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  Users not knowing what a url bar even is will be actively dangerous when they've somehow managed to land on a fishing site though. I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me
  - Gigachad 5y ago
shadowgovt 5y ago
> and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are. "What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain. Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what things really are is "utterly incompatible with human cognition." There's an entire field of disciplined study to build a compatibility layer regular people can use; without it, all these fancy computers are just dumb matter in weird shapes.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I think a good point to bring up despite it being absurd. It's not that current trends in UX hide "what things really are" because we all decide what the metaphors are so much as current UX trends don't teach users the vocabulary we use to talk about the parts of a UI. You literally just have to know what a "search bar" is -- nothing is ever going to tell you. There's no text on the screen that says "Search Bar." The fact that people who work in tech have to jump from precise terminology like "open your browser, and navigate to $URL" to stuff like "click the E and then find the bar at the top where you search thing and type..." is 100% our failing. We are the ones responsible for creating a population of people who are tech "illiterate" because we've spend all our time and effort keeping the words from users.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Correct. And decades of research have strongly suggested there's an upper limit to how much you can teach the average user. Remember: XEROX PARC's GUI breakthrough was "What if we make working on a computer feel like pushing stuff around on an office desk." "Educating the user" required walking three-quarters of the way to what they were already familiar with. Instead of trying to teach users how a search bar is different from a URL bar, there's a lot of meat on the bones of the idea of just making them the same thing. They look like the same thing. They act like the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing?
    - 5y ago
admax88qqq 5y ago
> but it teaches bad behavior I wouldn't call it bad behaviour. Why are the users behaving bad and not the interfaces? Computers are meant to serve users.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Safeguards can increase bad behavior because users come to depend on them. Removing safeguards forces users to break that dependency.
- saba2008 5y ago
  Because it confuses and pushes users toward wrong mental model of surrounding world.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    Why is their mental model wrong? Perhaps the model of having separate url vs search boxes is wrong.
    - jkfdrsak 5y ago
      If these people read a bad news story about google, they will not know how to stop using google for any and all web access. A discerning consumer often opts to alter their product use under similar circumstances. They are dependent on a middleman because their understanding of the boxes they type things into does not reflect reality. This is what it means for a mental model to be "wrong". The realized model of having two separate boxes could only ever be "wrong" in a moral or aesthetic sense. This is not the case for mental models, which are incorrect when they do not correspond to reality.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        I think if we imagine that a user, having read some bad news about Google, will respond with "I'm never typing anything into that little search box next to my URL bar again" and isn't simultaneously a user savvy enough to respond to such news by reconfiguring their network stack to blackhole all traffic to Google servers, we're thinking of users that exist in such a small quantity that we could address their concerns by finding them, one by one, and teaching them how to edit a network stack. The vast bulk of users would respond either by changing nothing about their behavior because all this stuff is inside-baseball to them, or changing their behavior by resetting their browser's search bar to some other target (for example, I can go into Chrome right now and remove Google from the list of search engines). At this point, one really has to reach to conclude that awesomebars are bad for end-users without an ideology that doesn't reflect the average user very well at all.
zeven7 5y ago
I disagree. My grandfather was happily typing websites into search bars long before the two bars were combined into one. Users weren't taught to do this any more than babies were taught to cry.
lowlevel 5y ago
Not only allow, but forcefully redirect their search input up into the address bar. In my opinion this has been a deliberate and concerted effort by google to get everyone to 'search' instead of go directly to sites and this ux behaviour has been bothering me for a very long time now. I am not at all surprised people are searching for https after all this time. That being said, there is likely a large number of urls pasted into the search box vs the address bar. (Hardly anyone can tell the difference anymore.)
- judge2020 5y ago
  Note that, sometime this year or 2020, Google stopped redirecting the search bar on the new tab page to the top url bar in Chrome. The omnibox search still does both web addressing and searching, but the new tab page has considerably less-confusing UX now.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  You're conflating correlation and causation. Unified URL and search was initially introduced by Firefox (via the awesomebar) in 2008, because they'd observed in user testing that users couldn't tell the difference between search text box and URL text box and were disinclined to learn; rather than continue to retrain users (which they'd attempted with multiple iterations of resizing, new icons, etc.), they unified the features and relied upon the two inputs having wildly different shapes of text to disambiguate. Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Some would call that good UI Not me! Confusing the users was deliberate.

mfext 5y ago

Actually it was Mozilla

nathancahill 5y ago
Firefox 3. The "AwesomeBar". https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-awesome-about-firefox-3/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/a-little-something-aweso... Looking at those old screenshots shows me how much the current autocomplete has regressed. The suggestions used to be so much better since it was a literal text search across titles and URLs. I remember you could configure how many results were displayed, I always set it to the max. The 2-line rich display was awesome for scanning URLs too. The "URL after the title" we have now makes it impossible to do that. Edit: Fixed most of these annoyances with this: https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-bar.html https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
- lowlevel 5y ago
  I think this is because AwesomeBar had a design goal of helping end users instead of total global search domination. Just a hunch.

londons_explore 5y ago

If you paste a link into the google search box, a good fraction of the time it doesn't lead you on a path to arriving at that link. For example, try the URL of this page. For me, zero results.

phkahler 5y ago
Using the search box on Google. If you put search terms in the URL bar on Chrome you'll get search results.
jpindar 5y ago
For me it gave one result - this page.
- dleslie 5y ago
  People trying to search it likely raised its indexing priority.
rchaud 5y ago
The URL of this page probably hasn't been indexed yet as it was created today. It also doesn't include any identifiable strings of text, just a page ID number.

londons_explore 5y ago

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.

garaetjjte 5y ago
I don't think this is good example, choke valve just doesn't exist on any "modern" car.
- soylentcola 5y ago
  Yeah, I only know about it from using other carbureted things (lawnmower, generator, motorcycle, etc.) If I'd only ever started up a modern car, I probably wouldn't know about it either.
aceazzameen 5y ago
This is a good analogy. Quite frequently I think "if only more companies did a better job at educating users instead of dumbing things down." But then I remember a lot of users don't want to be educated about things they're not interested in. They just want things to work so they can move on to whatever else they have going on in their lives.
bmicraft 5y ago
Users not knowing what a url bar even is will be actively dangerous when they've somehow managed to land on a fishing site though. I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me
- Gigachad 5y ago

shadowgovt 5y ago

> and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are. "What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain. Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what things really are is "utterly incompatible with human cognition." There's an entire field of disciplined study to build a compatibility layer regular people can use; without it, all these fancy computers are just dumb matter in weird shapes.

Spivak 5y ago
I think a good point to bring up despite it being absurd. It's not that current trends in UX hide "what things really are" because we all decide what the metaphors are so much as current UX trends don't teach users the vocabulary we use to talk about the parts of a UI. You literally just have to know what a "search bar" is -- nothing is ever going to tell you. There's no text on the screen that says "Search Bar." The fact that people who work in tech have to jump from precise terminology like "open your browser, and navigate to $URL" to stuff like "click the E and then find the bar at the top where you search thing and type..." is 100% our failing. We are the ones responsible for creating a population of people who are tech "illiterate" because we've spend all our time and effort keeping the words from users.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Correct. And decades of research have strongly suggested there's an upper limit to how much you can teach the average user. Remember: XEROX PARC's GUI breakthrough was "What if we make working on a computer feel like pushing stuff around on an office desk." "Educating the user" required walking three-quarters of the way to what they were already familiar with. Instead of trying to teach users how a search bar is different from a URL bar, there's a lot of meat on the bones of the idea of just making them the same thing. They look like the same thing. They act like the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing?
  - 5y ago

admax88qqq 5y ago

> but it teaches bad behavior I wouldn't call it bad behaviour. Why are the users behaving bad and not the interfaces? Computers are meant to serve users.

vorpalhex 5y ago
Safeguards can increase bad behavior because users come to depend on them. Removing safeguards forces users to break that dependency.
saba2008 5y ago
Because it confuses and pushes users toward wrong mental model of surrounding world.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Why is their mental model wrong? Perhaps the model of having separate url vs search boxes is wrong.
  - jkfdrsak 5y ago
    If these people read a bad news story about google, they will not know how to stop using google for any and all web access. A discerning consumer often opts to alter their product use under similar circumstances. They are dependent on a middleman because their understanding of the boxes they type things into does not reflect reality. This is what it means for a mental model to be "wrong". The realized model of having two separate boxes could only ever be "wrong" in a moral or aesthetic sense. This is not the case for mental models, which are incorrect when they do not correspond to reality.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      I think if we imagine that a user, having read some bad news about Google, will respond with "I'm never typing anything into that little search box next to my URL bar again" and isn't simultaneously a user savvy enough to respond to such news by reconfiguring their network stack to blackhole all traffic to Google servers, we're thinking of users that exist in such a small quantity that we could address their concerns by finding them, one by one, and teaching them how to edit a network stack. The vast bulk of users would respond either by changing nothing about their behavior because all this stuff is inside-baseball to them, or changing their behavior by resetting their browser's search bar to some other target (for example, I can go into Chrome right now and remove Google from the list of search engines). At this point, one really has to reach to conclude that awesomebars are bad for end-users without an ideology that doesn't reflect the average user very well at all.

zeven7 5y ago

I disagree. My grandfather was happily typing websites into search bars long before the two bars were combined into one. Users weren't taught to do this any more than babies were taught to cry.

lowlevel 5y ago

Not only allow, but forcefully redirect their search input up into the address bar. In my opinion this has been a deliberate and concerted effort by google to get everyone to 'search' instead of go directly to sites and this ux behaviour has been bothering me for a very long time now. I am not at all surprised people are searching for https after all this time. That being said, there is likely a large number of urls pasted into the search box vs the address bar. (Hardly anyone can tell the difference anymore.)

judge2020 5y ago
Note that, sometime this year or 2020, Google stopped redirecting the search bar on the new tab page to the top url bar in Chrome. The omnibox search still does both web addressing and searching, but the new tab page has considerably less-confusing UX now.
shadowgovt 5y ago
You're conflating correlation and causation. Unified URL and search was initially introduced by Firefox (via the awesomebar) in 2008, because they'd observed in user testing that users couldn't tell the difference between search text box and URL text box and were disinclined to learn; rather than continue to retrain users (which they'd attempted with multiple iterations of resizing, new icons, etc.), they unified the features and relied upon the two inputs having wildly different shapes of text to disambiguate. Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> Some would call that good UI Not me! Confusing the users was deliberate.