23 ms·

This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search.

by cletus 5y ago

This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally). But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design. Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton. So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.

samsolomon 5y ago
This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct. Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.
- megous 5y ago
  ctrl+k and I know I'll be searching in a web search engine ctrl+l and I know I'll be opening an URL and if the domain doesn't exist it will fail I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever. Having to type https:// https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones. Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no. So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case. I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.
klyrs 5y ago
Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config, but I don't think it's possible to make the url bar a clean url bar anymore (this is an invitation for corrections). It's annoying because I navigate to pages via URLs, and all I don't want to send those to a search engine for "suggestions" (though, a locally-indexed history is nice). All too often, I'll type in a url and it will send that to a search engine, and then the page I wanted to go to is buried under ads. Useless. Especially now that Firefox is moving to paid ads in the "url" bar... blech.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  > Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config The search bar still exists in Firefox if you want it to btw. I use it daily.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    My mistake, I meant to say url bar. Last time I tried this, the url bar had all the functionality of the search bar, which misses the point. Am I remembering wrong?
    - wartijn_ 5y ago
      The settings screen has the option "show search in address bar results". You can turn that off.
      - gnabgib 5y ago
        It's the perfect setup really, you can turn it off, but if you want it you can type "? <search term>" into the address bar and it'll go to default search - or use one of your engine short codes as the first word "@google hackernews" about:config -> keyword.enabled -> false (to stop sending possible search terms automatically to your default search engine, this includes when you type a URL firefox mistakes for a search term) about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -> false (to stop firefox trying a DNS lookup/connection with the term you typed with www. before, .com after)
MauranKilom 5y ago
On the other hand, I despise this exact change in Firefox. When I want to search, I use the search bar. When I want to enter an address, I use the address bar. I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and it is annoying to no end if the browser confuses one for the other. For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead (see: computers don't know what users want). That's why I personally prefer the ability to make that choice explicitly. I get it, I'm not the kind of user this article is about. And maybe I'm just insufficiently exposed to the other paradigm to have become "fluent" in it. But I just wanted to point out that there definitely are users whose mental model differentiates search terms and URLs.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  In Firefox at least you can focus address bar for search with default engine with Ctrl-K or Ctrl-J.
  - duckmysick 5y ago
    For anyone wondering why there's two shortcuts for the same action: > If you have enabled Emacs-style text editing shortcuts in GNOME, they will also work in Firefox. When an Emacs text editing shortcut conflicts with the default shortcuts (as occurs with Ctrl+K), the Emacs shortcut will take precedence if focus is inside a text box (which would include the address bar and search bar). In such cases you should use the alternate keyboard shortcut if one is listed below. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...
- Adrig 5y ago
  >For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead Press space? Not every use case has to be addressed by UI elements, especially when we're talking about edge cases
  - asdff 5y ago
    Especially considering if it really grinds your gears, you can have your search and address bar be discrete pretty trivially.
sseagull 5y ago
> Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL Why don't they? This is a somewhat serious question. Part of it, in my opinion, is we are moving too fast, and giving up on users to quickly. With enough education, people will understand. But enough education = at least a generation or two, introducing it in schools at a young age, etc. But we just threw our hands up and said "oh well, they don't get it, lets make it simple". URL = phone number. Search box = Phone book. They are two very different things, and having them both in the same box I feel confuses some people even more.
- darkerside 5y ago
  But it's not phone number vs phone book. It's phone number vs automated operator that will connect you where you are trying to go. I am technical and I often just search instead of URL just because it requires less precision. Google is just DNS with a few extra steps.
  - sseagull 5y ago
    Ok, it's going to find a book on the shelf by its author/title or dewey decimal number, vs. looking it up in the card catalog by subject (and then going to the shelf). That should appeal to the older crowd.
5- 5y ago
> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" browsers used to do these these things (trying to add 'www.' or '.com' etc. if the domain doesn't resolve) automatically in the location bar (which wasn't the search bar, so there was no ambiguity): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#w_domain-guessing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#...
everdrive 5y ago
>Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. I don't think good software always aims for the lowest common denominator. It's not an unequivocal good that users' lack of education is catered to. Infantilizing users makes them more dependent on services, and less able to navigate the internet.
- Nalta 5y ago
  I feel like this is the same argument as "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    Except conflating the address and search bar, then adding search suggestions, has objective problems. It's a bad thing that typing URLs in your address bar leaks them to Google/etc.'s search completion service, allowing search engines to track which URLs people begin visiting (not just searches they make).
  - taxicabjesus 5y ago
    > "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works My passenger had my phone number memorized. I went to visit him when he called me from jail. I used his gmail password to get his contacts' phone numbers to try to get someone else to bail him out, but it was only $300. After a few days I paid up to bail him out. He missed his next court date. I went to the bail revocation hearing a couple months later, and got $200 of that $300 back (iirc). I make an effort to regularly exercise my mental phonebook, on his account. Who are your lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      That story reminds me of this homeless guy I helped out one night. He was wearing a suit, which is why I believed him, actually. He said he was a pilot, who just moved into a house but locked himself out with his wallet inside. So he attempted to break into his own house. The neighbors called the cops and he was arrested. Now he was “homeless” until he got things sorted out. I ran into him a few days later, he taught me how to fly and became a friend that I still email from time to time.
jamesfisher 5y ago
Even as a technical user, I Google "natwest" instead of typing in "natwest.com". Much safer than typing "natwest.co" and getting caught by phishing sites.
- Falling3 5y ago
  I was going to chime in with the same thing. I do this as well, particularly while browsing on mobile. It's an extra click, but I can leave off at the very least the TLD and get better spell checking.
fbelzile 5y ago
I think a good analogy is an automatic vs manual car. Most people prefer to have one pedal for the accelerator. But you still have many car enthusiasts (web enthusiasts) that know how cars (the web) work and want to control the mechanics behind the scenes. I wish it was still an option provided to users. Google has a financial incentive for the Omnibar though. After searching for "facebook" users would click the first link, which might also happen to be an ad for Facebook. Effectively, turning a profit from the laziness of people not typing .com.
- nly 5y ago
  In the UK most cars are still manual. Is this really not the case in the US? Having a clutch gives you a lot of fine grained control
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
>Think like a user, not an engineer. So your technology, too, can become a melange of idiotic decisions where you leak things into a search engine! While you're at it, only feed your kids ice cream and pizza because that's what they want to eat. Think like a kid, not an adult.
- burnished 5y ago
  Its really easy for engineers to get a feeling of superiority because they 'get it' and to wonder why everyone else is so stupid, how could they use this thing they don't understand etc. etc. etc. You've got weak spots in the tech stack too. I'd wager there are tools that you use without knowing even about their existence. The point isn't to do dumb shit, the point is to have empathy and consider the perspective of other humans who are just as intelligent as you but knowledgeable in different domains.
JoshTriplett 5y ago
> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" Tech-savvy people will type f, see that their browser completes "acebook.com", and press enter. That's a form of search, it's just more directly provided by the browser and unambiguously serving the user. (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.)
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.) I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to see his bigotry in your feed? Unfollow him. Or in my case, just unfriend him entirely. You want to follow your government representatives to see what's on their mind? Great, just don't engage with the morons in the comment section. Facebook is a great way to keep up with what your friends are up to. A friend of mine recently went on a trip to Scotland, and I enjoyed his posts on what he was doing. When I got married, it was an easy way to share the photos, since nobody uses Flickr these days.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    I think the biggest issue with Facebook I've learned recently is that on the margin their algorithms push you towards seeing things that increases their engagement numbers. I think it's hard to understand the effect on you from having every recommended item slightly not what you were asking for in the direction of making you mad.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    That works for issues like "annoying uncle" in the US, I don't think, for example, Rohingya in Myanmar could just un-friend the ethnic cleansing that Facebook contributed to. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
  - 5y ago
benbristow 5y ago
> It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design You can still enable the separate search bar in the settings if you want.
datavirtue 5y ago
Google wanted all user input leaking to them. They got it. When I first saw this feature it felt like a natural progression...a real innovative feature. I didn't need it though. In the end, browsers probably should not have knowledge of search engines, for various reasons.
II2II 5y ago
I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective. I would also argue that the omnibar is designed from the engineer's perspective rather than the end user's perspective. The engineer said something to the effect of, "we can differentiate an address from a search query based upon the format of the input". It sounds good on paper. It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts.
- sly010 5y ago
  There is always a tradeoff between making something better for power users and making it bullet proof for (ab)users. Indeed, chrome strikes a pretty good balance. Also > bar should be particularly high hehe
- unsui 5y ago
  > believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction and behavior. If a design promotes incoherent behavior, it's not the user that's wrong; getting users to change intuitive behavior requires training and cognitive effort. Sadly, why vim and emacs are still difficult for newbies to pick up. Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
notatoad 5y ago
>Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", because people don't understand that the chrome omnibox performs a google search, and they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them. if you're trying to draw any conclusions about user preferences from user behaviour, you have to accept that you're going to be wrong about a significant portion of your users. one workflow might be "better" for some portion of your users, but it won't mesh with the mental model of some other portion of your users. different groups will form different expectations and habits, and a single UI will not completely satisfy the expectations of every group.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.
  - notatoad 5y ago
    I don't mean to indict any browser's UI paradigm. My point was just that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from user behaviour because user behaviour is often dumb and a poor signal of what users actually want.
- burnished 5y ago
  the people who don't understand the difference are largely unperturbed by this workflow. which means it satisfies their expectations, even if it isn't optimized for them.
- rnotaro 5y ago
  >they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them. I would not even be surprised if that kind of user would search "Google" on the dedicated "Search box" because they are more confortable performing the search on the actual Google website than on a UI element inside the browser toolbar.
asdff 5y ago
On the other hand, I can't think of any advantage myself to having these things be discrete boxes, and I know what a search term and a URL is (as I'm sure most users do, give them some credit here). Corner cases rarely happen and if I think something might look like a url but is a search term, you can prepend the term with whitespace. Ultimately having them not be discrete boxes means I can see more of the url before it folds, which I prefer.
- abruzzi 5y ago
  Corner cases happen every day where I work. Specifically, we have an internal domain, and many users, rather than typing finance.pdq.xy.pg (made up domain) we like to type finance to go directly to the correct server. But we can't because 9 times out of 10 chrome/safari/edge interpret as a search. I either have to remember to put in a trailing slash, i.e. finance/ or type the FQDN. Thats the only reason I use firefox--I can separate search from urls.
8ytecoder 5y ago
Firefox has has an "omni" bar for a long time. Firefox could search your bookmarks and history as you type in an URL (in addition to keywords that could trigger searches). It was one of the key reasons (in addition to tabs) that I switched to Firefox back in the day. (Or am I misremembering this?)
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  It was back in Firefox 3 (released a few months before Chrome was announced) that Firefox’s address bar got the last significant pieces of that functionality and was dubbed the AwesomeBar. I think that at that time Firefox still struggled with single-word searches from the address bar, treating them as domain names; if so, that was probably the last material difference (as distinct from social) before Firefox could reasonably remove the search box by default.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Yes, Firefox was one of the first to define the "omni" bar experience, but one of the slowest to remove (by default) a dedicated search box even after they proved most users were using the "omni" bar.
HWR_14 5y ago
Chrome's omnibar was designed to allow Google to MITM every web request, not to simplify things for the user. Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.
pronik 5y ago
Firefox actually had both, you could always search with the "main" bar. That's why having two has been so infuriating over the years, if I ever had to use Firefox, I've removed the search bar immediately. However, one thing that Firefox failed to fix over dozens of versions have been one-word-searches, which Chrome handled correctly while Firefox tried to resolve that one word as a domain and didn't even fall back to search if that failed. That single thing has brought me back to Chrome within minutes every time I've wanted to try Firefox again.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Prefix one word searches with a question mark and then space ("? ") will always search in Firefox. Old Power User trick from decades ago even when Firefox still had a split search box by default. (There's also search keywords to force it to search with a non-default search provider such as starting a search with "@wikipedia " to search Wikipedia.)
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Yes, I removed the search box and used search keywords long before they changed it. For the single word searches, I've never noticed such a problem. It should try to resolve it first, in case it exists on your LAN, and falling back to search works fine for me.
loeg 5y ago
> Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton. I've actually switched to searching even for URLs I know, if they don't autocomplete from history. My typing accuracy isn't 100%, and I'm confident the top Google result will be the correct domain even if I make a typo (rather than some phishing clone squatting on an adjacent name).
tdeck 5y ago
Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).
- RuggedPineapple 5y ago
  But Firefox was derived from mozilla, where the URL bar would search if what you entered wasn't a URL.
Stratoscope 5y ago
Even engineers do this. A couple of years ago I watched a colleague - a very talented software engineer - do a Google search. He typed "google" into the search/URL bar and hit Enter. This took him to a search results page, with Google as the first entry. He clicked on Google. This took him to the Google home page. He entered his search query into the search box on the Google home page, and hit Enter. Now he had the search results he wanted!
- alex_smart 5y ago
  This can only happen on a browser where you haven't visited Google before, right? On any "real" use-case scenario, typing "google" into the omnibar and hitting enter, should take you directly to google.com. I can just type g and hit enter on my browser, and it still takes me to google.com
cblconfederate 5y ago
I don't think this is correct at all. Google's decision was intentional to capture every request, even ones who are simply searching for a known domain. Users adapted to google's pattern and learned things the wrong way. This is only one example of the damage caused by very-low-friction, addictive interfaces. Users have increasingly lost the capability to navigate hierarchical interfaces and increasingly use web search instead of looking around for the right button
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  They could do that anyway
wolpoli 5y ago
> IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook" I wonder if this holds true for both PC and Mobile, because it is easier to perform a search and trust the search engine to deliver the link, rather than finish typing ".com".
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design." Not considering Mozilla's "business model" is forwarding searches by default to Yahoo/Google for a price. Would be surprising if the search engine website contracting with Mozilla did not have an expectation that the Firefox UI would be conducive to submitting as many default "searches" as possible, whether intentionally or not. (User could type an address in the search bar and it would be forwarded to Google. She now has a Google cookie.) Would also be surprising if there was not a similar expectation that the Firefox settings UI make it relatively unlikely that users would change the search engine defaults. Chrome's design is good for Google. More so than Firefox's design is good for [search engine partner]. For users who do not want to be accidentally sending queries to Google, the "Omnibox" design sucks. It also is incorrect in that it defeats the notion of what is and what is not a valid domain name or a valid URL. It does not educate users about the www, it allows them to stay ignorant. Would not be surprising if that is how Google views its users and prefers that they remain unaware of what is happening. For example, look at how Google descibes the NID cookie. They are not lying but they are repeatedly suggesting that its most signifcant purpose is a user's configuration preferences. However its primary purpose is for advertising. A fully informed user with choice over consent is apparently not what Google wants. https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US The primary purpose of the "omnibox " is not to benefit the user (although it may do so for some users), it is to benefit Google's "business model" of collecting data about users and selling online ad services.
gmurphy 5y ago
I designed[1] the Chrome Omnibox, and appreciate a lot of the conjecture in this thread and other places - I wish I was as devious as many people assume we were. The short version is that while many users can differentiate, it's more a problem of WHEN they differentiate - Chrome's entire design philosophy was around speed, and the omnibox was designed so that we had a simple destination that a user could focus on when they had decided to go somewhere else, but before they had decided WHERE they wanted to go to or HOW they were going to get there, and then make it so they wouldn't have to think about the HOW. If their search term autocompleted to a URL so they don't have to go through search, that was a win. This same philosophy was what drove putting the most visited pages on the New Tab Page (which was a blank page in most browsers at the time). Some users plan out their actions before they take them, but I wanted to make everything as streamlined as possible so you could interact with Chrome as you thought about what you wanted, and not making you wait until after. [1] I was the designer and occasional engineer, but the entire team takes the credit - everyone was behind the idea from before we even started work on Chrome, and many smart people deserve more credit than I do for how good it ended up being.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  How do you feel that your invention was used to harm users and empower a quasi-global monopoly on search engines for the profit of tech billionnaire psychopaths and secret services? I don't think you had to have bad intentions (just like physicists and the atom bomb), but do you think the web is better for users without search boxes or search engine choices, and with Google forcing centralized AMP proxying down everyone's throat and therefore trying to actually completely remove URLs?
  - frostwarrior 5y ago
    Please, if we were to call out every developer who works or has ever worked in AnyEvilCorp® then almost no one comes out alive, maybe except RMS
    - croes 5y ago
      So the excuse is everybody else jumped from the bridge too?
apatters 5y ago
I find it interesting that the discussion about this feature is only about design/interaction principles. I mean, maybe this is right and a merged search/URL bar is the best call from a design standpoint. I don't mind having one. But do you really think that's why Google implemented a feature in Chrome that sends more people to Google? It was, I'm sure, a revenue decision first and foremost, and Google is probably delighted when people identify it as something else. The same logic applies just as well for any browser vendor who makes money off of search partners.
tablespoon 5y ago
> But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design. I think you're making the mistake of thinking of "users" as a monolithic, lowest common denominator group. There are users who think like you describe, and there are users who do not. Also catering to people's existing (perhaps oversimple) mental models ensures those models never change. One of the PR issues with Firefox is that it has/had many features that suited the latter group, but decided to drop them to ape Chrome.

by cletus 5y ago

samsolomon 5y ago

This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct. Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.

megous 5y ago
ctrl+k and I know I'll be searching in a web search engine ctrl+l and I know I'll be opening an URL and if the domain doesn't exist it will fail I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever. Having to type https:// https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones. Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no. So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case. I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.

klyrs 5y ago

Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config, but I don't think it's possible to make the url bar a clean url bar anymore (this is an invitation for corrections). It's annoying because I navigate to pages via URLs, and all I don't want to send those to a search engine for "suggestions" (though, a locally-indexed history is nice). All too often, I'll type in a url and it will send that to a search engine, and then the page I wanted to go to is buried under ads. Useless. Especially now that Firefox is moving to paid ads in the "url" bar... blech.

MauranKilom 5y ago
> Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config The search bar still exists in Firefox if you want it to btw. I use it daily.
- klyrs 5y ago
  My mistake, I meant to say url bar. Last time I tried this, the url bar had all the functionality of the search bar, which misses the point. Am I remembering wrong?
  - wartijn_ 5y ago
    The settings screen has the option "show search in address bar results". You can turn that off.
    - gnabgib 5y ago
      It's the perfect setup really, you can turn it off, but if you want it you can type "? <search term>" into the address bar and it'll go to default search - or use one of your engine short codes as the first word "@google hackernews" about:config -> keyword.enabled -> false (to stop sending possible search terms automatically to your default search engine, this includes when you type a URL firefox mistakes for a search term) about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -> false (to stop firefox trying a DNS lookup/connection with the term you typed with www. before, .com after)

MauranKilom 5y ago

On the other hand, I despise this exact change in Firefox. When I want to search, I use the search bar. When I want to enter an address, I use the address bar. I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and it is annoying to no end if the browser confuses one for the other. For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead (see: computers don't know what users want). That's why I personally prefer the ability to make that choice explicitly. I get it, I'm not the kind of user this article is about. And maybe I'm just insufficiently exposed to the other paradigm to have become "fluent" in it. But I just wanted to point out that there definitely are users whose mental model differentiates search terms and URLs.

forgotpwd16 5y ago
In Firefox at least you can focus address bar for search with default engine with Ctrl-K or Ctrl-J.
- duckmysick 5y ago
  For anyone wondering why there's two shortcuts for the same action: > If you have enabled Emacs-style text editing shortcuts in GNOME, they will also work in Firefox. When an Emacs text editing shortcut conflicts with the default shortcuts (as occurs with Ctrl+K), the Emacs shortcut will take precedence if focus is inside a text box (which would include the address bar and search bar). In such cases you should use the alternate keyboard shortcut if one is listed below. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...
Adrig 5y ago
>For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead Press space? Not every use case has to be addressed by UI elements, especially when we're talking about edge cases
- asdff 5y ago
  Especially considering if it really grinds your gears, you can have your search and address bar be discrete pretty trivially.

sseagull 5y ago

> Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL Why don't they? This is a somewhat serious question. Part of it, in my opinion, is we are moving too fast, and giving up on users to quickly. With enough education, people will understand. But enough education = at least a generation or two, introducing it in schools at a young age, etc. But we just threw our hands up and said "oh well, they don't get it, lets make it simple". URL = phone number. Search box = Phone book. They are two very different things, and having them both in the same box I feel confuses some people even more.

darkerside 5y ago
But it's not phone number vs phone book. It's phone number vs automated operator that will connect you where you are trying to go. I am technical and I often just search instead of URL just because it requires less precision. Google is just DNS with a few extra steps.
- sseagull 5y ago
  Ok, it's going to find a book on the shelf by its author/title or dewey decimal number, vs. looking it up in the card catalog by subject (and then going to the shelf). That should appeal to the older crowd.

5- 5y ago

> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" browsers used to do these these things (trying to add 'www.' or '.com' etc. if the domain doesn't resolve) automatically in the location bar (which wasn't the search bar, so there was no ambiguity): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#w_domain-guessing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#...

everdrive 5y ago

>Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. I don't think good software always aims for the lowest common denominator. It's not an unequivocal good that users' lack of education is catered to. Infantilizing users makes them more dependent on services, and less able to navigate the internet.

Nalta 5y ago
I feel like this is the same argument as "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Except conflating the address and search bar, then adding search suggestions, has objective problems. It's a bad thing that typing URLs in your address bar leaks them to Google/etc.'s search completion service, allowing search engines to track which URLs people begin visiting (not just searches they make).
- taxicabjesus 5y ago
  > "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works My passenger had my phone number memorized. I went to visit him when he called me from jail. I used his gmail password to get his contacts' phone numbers to try to get someone else to bail him out, but it was only $300. After a few days I paid up to bail him out. He missed his next court date. I went to the bail revocation hearing a couple months later, and got $200 of that $300 back (iirc). I make an effort to regularly exercise my mental phonebook, on his account. Who are your lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    That story reminds me of this homeless guy I helped out one night. He was wearing a suit, which is why I believed him, actually. He said he was a pilot, who just moved into a house but locked himself out with his wallet inside. So he attempted to break into his own house. The neighbors called the cops and he was arrested. Now he was “homeless” until he got things sorted out. I ran into him a few days later, he taught me how to fly and became a friend that I still email from time to time.

jamesfisher 5y ago

Even as a technical user, I Google "natwest" instead of typing in "natwest.com". Much safer than typing "natwest.co" and getting caught by phishing sites.

Falling3 5y ago
I was going to chime in with the same thing. I do this as well, particularly while browsing on mobile. It's an extra click, but I can leave off at the very least the TLD and get better spell checking.

fbelzile 5y ago

I think a good analogy is an automatic vs manual car. Most people prefer to have one pedal for the accelerator. But you still have many car enthusiasts (web enthusiasts) that know how cars (the web) work and want to control the mechanics behind the scenes. I wish it was still an option provided to users. Google has a financial incentive for the Omnibar though. After searching for "facebook" users would click the first link, which might also happen to be an ad for Facebook. Effectively, turning a profit from the laziness of people not typing .com.

nly 5y ago
In the UK most cars are still manual. Is this really not the case in the US? Having a clutch gives you a lot of fine grained control

shrimp_emoji 5y ago

>Think like a user, not an engineer. So your technology, too, can become a melange of idiotic decisions where you leak things into a search engine! While you're at it, only feed your kids ice cream and pizza because that's what they want to eat. Think like a kid, not an adult.

burnished 5y ago
Its really easy for engineers to get a feeling of superiority because they 'get it' and to wonder why everyone else is so stupid, how could they use this thing they don't understand etc. etc. etc. You've got weak spots in the tech stack too. I'd wager there are tools that you use without knowing even about their existence. The point isn't to do dumb shit, the point is to have empathy and consider the perspective of other humans who are just as intelligent as you but knowledgeable in different domains.

JoshTriplett 5y ago

> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" Tech-savvy people will type f, see that their browser completes "acebook.com", and press enter. That's a form of search, it's just more directly provided by the browser and unambiguously serving the user. (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.)

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.) I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to see his bigotry in your feed? Unfollow him. Or in my case, just unfriend him entirely. You want to follow your government representatives to see what's on their mind? Great, just don't engage with the morons in the comment section. Facebook is a great way to keep up with what your friends are up to. A friend of mine recently went on a trip to Scotland, and I enjoyed his posts on what he was doing. When I got married, it was an easy way to share the photos, since nobody uses Flickr these days.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  I think the biggest issue with Facebook I've learned recently is that on the margin their algorithms push you towards seeing things that increases their engagement numbers. I think it's hard to understand the effect on you from having every recommended item slightly not what you were asking for in the direction of making you mad.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  That works for issues like "annoying uncle" in the US, I don't think, for example, Rohingya in Myanmar could just un-friend the ethnic cleansing that Facebook contributed to. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- 5y ago

benbristow 5y ago

> It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design You can still enable the separate search bar in the settings if you want.

datavirtue 5y ago

Google wanted all user input leaking to them. They got it. When I first saw this feature it felt like a natural progression...a real innovative feature. I didn't need it though. In the end, browsers probably should not have knowledge of search engines, for various reasons.

II2II 5y ago

I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective. I would also argue that the omnibar is designed from the engineer's perspective rather than the end user's perspective. The engineer said something to the effect of, "we can differentiate an address from a search query based upon the format of the input". It sounds good on paper. It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts.

sly010 5y ago
There is always a tradeoff between making something better for power users and making it bullet proof for (ab)users. Indeed, chrome strikes a pretty good balance. Also > bar should be particularly high hehe
unsui 5y ago
> believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction and behavior. If a design promotes incoherent behavior, it's not the user that's wrong; getting users to change intuitive behavior requires training and cognitive effort. Sadly, why vim and emacs are still difficult for newbies to pick up. Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

notatoad 5y ago

>Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", because people don't understand that the chrome omnibox performs a google search, and they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them. if you're trying to draw any conclusions about user preferences from user behaviour, you have to accept that you're going to be wrong about a significant portion of your users. one workflow might be "better" for some portion of your users, but it won't mesh with the mental model of some other portion of your users. different groups will form different expectations and habits, and a single UI will not completely satisfy the expectations of every group.

tshaddox 5y ago
> one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.
- notatoad 5y ago
  I don't mean to indict any browser's UI paradigm. My point was just that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from user behaviour because user behaviour is often dumb and a poor signal of what users actually want.
burnished 5y ago
the people who don't understand the difference are largely unperturbed by this workflow. which means it satisfies their expectations, even if it isn't optimized for them.
rnotaro 5y ago
>they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them. I would not even be surprised if that kind of user would search "Google" on the dedicated "Search box" because they are more confortable performing the search on the actual Google website than on a UI element inside the browser toolbar.

asdff 5y ago

On the other hand, I can't think of any advantage myself to having these things be discrete boxes, and I know what a search term and a URL is (as I'm sure most users do, give them some credit here). Corner cases rarely happen and if I think something might look like a url but is a search term, you can prepend the term with whitespace. Ultimately having them not be discrete boxes means I can see more of the url before it folds, which I prefer.

abruzzi 5y ago
Corner cases happen every day where I work. Specifically, we have an internal domain, and many users, rather than typing finance.pdq.xy.pg (made up domain) we like to type finance to go directly to the correct server. But we can't because 9 times out of 10 chrome/safari/edge interpret as a search. I either have to remember to put in a trailing slash, i.e. finance/ or type the FQDN. Thats the only reason I use firefox--I can separate search from urls.

8ytecoder 5y ago

Firefox has has an "omni" bar for a long time. Firefox could search your bookmarks and history as you type in an URL (in addition to keywords that could trigger searches). It was one of the key reasons (in addition to tabs) that I switched to Firefox back in the day. (Or am I misremembering this?)

chrismorgan 5y ago
It was back in Firefox 3 (released a few months before Chrome was announced) that Firefox’s address bar got the last significant pieces of that functionality and was dubbed the AwesomeBar. I think that at that time Firefox still struggled with single-word searches from the address bar, treating them as domain names; if so, that was probably the last material difference (as distinct from social) before Firefox could reasonably remove the search box by default.
WorldMaker 5y ago
Yes, Firefox was one of the first to define the "omni" bar experience, but one of the slowest to remove (by default) a dedicated search box even after they proved most users were using the "omni" bar.

HWR_14 5y ago

Chrome's omnibar was designed to allow Google to MITM every web request, not to simplify things for the user. Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.

pronik 5y ago

Firefox actually had both, you could always search with the "main" bar. That's why having two has been so infuriating over the years, if I ever had to use Firefox, I've removed the search bar immediately. However, one thing that Firefox failed to fix over dozens of versions have been one-word-searches, which Chrome handled correctly while Firefox tried to resolve that one word as a domain and didn't even fall back to search if that failed. That single thing has brought me back to Chrome within minutes every time I've wanted to try Firefox again.

WorldMaker 5y ago
Prefix one word searches with a question mark and then space ("? ") will always search in Firefox. Old Power User trick from decades ago even when Firefox still had a split search box by default. (There's also search keywords to force it to search with a non-default search provider such as starting a search with "@wikipedia " to search Wikipedia.)
LinAGKar 5y ago
Yes, I removed the search box and used search keywords long before they changed it. For the single word searches, I've never noticed such a problem. It should try to resolve it first, in case it exists on your LAN, and falling back to search works fine for me.

loeg 5y ago

> Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton. I've actually switched to searching even for URLs I know, if they don't autocomplete from history. My typing accuracy isn't 100%, and I'm confident the top Google result will be the correct domain even if I make a typo (rather than some phishing clone squatting on an adjacent name).

tdeck 5y ago

Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).

RuggedPineapple 5y ago
But Firefox was derived from mozilla, where the URL bar would search if what you entered wasn't a URL.

Stratoscope 5y ago

Even engineers do this. A couple of years ago I watched a colleague - a very talented software engineer - do a Google search. He typed "google" into the search/URL bar and hit Enter. This took him to a search results page, with Google as the first entry. He clicked on Google. This took him to the Google home page. He entered his search query into the search box on the Google home page, and hit Enter. Now he had the search results he wanted!

alex_smart 5y ago
This can only happen on a browser where you haven't visited Google before, right? On any "real" use-case scenario, typing "google" into the omnibar and hitting enter, should take you directly to google.com. I can just type g and hit enter on my browser, and it still takes me to google.com

cblconfederate 5y ago

I don't think this is correct at all. Google's decision was intentional to capture every request, even ones who are simply searching for a known domain. Users adapted to google's pattern and learned things the wrong way. This is only one example of the damage caused by very-low-friction, addictive interfaces. Users have increasingly lost the capability to navigate hierarchical interfaces and increasingly use web search instead of looking around for the right button

LinAGKar 5y ago
They could do that anyway

wolpoli 5y ago

> IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook" I wonder if this holds true for both PC and Mobile, because it is easier to perform a search and trust the search engine to deliver the link, rather than finish typing ".com".

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design." Not considering Mozilla's "business model" is forwarding searches by default to Yahoo/Google for a price. Would be surprising if the search engine website contracting with Mozilla did not have an expectation that the Firefox UI would be conducive to submitting as many default "searches" as possible, whether intentionally or not. (User could type an address in the search bar and it would be forwarded to Google. She now has a Google cookie.) Would also be surprising if there was not a similar expectation that the Firefox settings UI make it relatively unlikely that users would change the search engine defaults. Chrome's design is good for Google. More so than Firefox's design is good for [search engine partner]. For users who do not want to be accidentally sending queries to Google, the "Omnibox" design sucks. It also is incorrect in that it defeats the notion of what is and what is not a valid domain name or a valid URL. It does not educate users about the www, it allows them to stay ignorant. Would not be surprising if that is how Google views its users and prefers that they remain unaware of what is happening. For example, look at how Google descibes the NID cookie. They are not lying but they are repeatedly suggesting that its most signifcant purpose is a user's configuration preferences. However its primary purpose is for advertising. A fully informed user with choice over consent is apparently not what Google wants. https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US The primary purpose of the "omnibox " is not to benefit the user (although it may do so for some users), it is to benefit Google's "business model" of collecting data about users and selling online ad services.

gmurphy 5y ago

I designed[1] the Chrome Omnibox, and appreciate a lot of the conjecture in this thread and other places - I wish I was as devious as many people assume we were. The short version is that while many users can differentiate, it's more a problem of WHEN they differentiate - Chrome's entire design philosophy was around speed, and the omnibox was designed so that we had a simple destination that a user could focus on when they had decided to go somewhere else, but before they had decided WHERE they wanted to go to or HOW they were going to get there, and then make it so they wouldn't have to think about the HOW. If their search term autocompleted to a URL so they don't have to go through search, that was a win. This same philosophy was what drove putting the most visited pages on the New Tab Page (which was a blank page in most browsers at the time). Some users plan out their actions before they take them, but I wanted to make everything as streamlined as possible so you could interact with Chrome as you thought about what you wanted, and not making you wait until after. [1] I was the designer and occasional engineer, but the entire team takes the credit - everyone was behind the idea from before we even started work on Chrome, and many smart people deserve more credit than I do for how good it ended up being.

southerntofu 5y ago
How do you feel that your invention was used to harm users and empower a quasi-global monopoly on search engines for the profit of tech billionnaire psychopaths and secret services? I don't think you had to have bad intentions (just like physicists and the atom bomb), but do you think the web is better for users without search boxes or search engine choices, and with Google forcing centralized AMP proxying down everyone's throat and therefore trying to actually completely remove URLs?
- frostwarrior 5y ago
  Please, if we were to call out every developer who works or has ever worked in AnyEvilCorp® then almost no one comes out alive, maybe except RMS
  - croes 5y ago
    So the excuse is everybody else jumped from the bridge too?

apatters 5y ago

I find it interesting that the discussion about this feature is only about design/interaction principles. I mean, maybe this is right and a merged search/URL bar is the best call from a design standpoint. I don't mind having one. But do you really think that's why Google implemented a feature in Chrome that sends more people to Google? It was, I'm sure, a revenue decision first and foremost, and Google is probably delighted when people identify it as something else. The same logic applies just as well for any browser vendor who makes money off of search partners.

tablespoon 5y ago

> But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design. I think you're making the mistake of thinking of "users" as a monolithic, lowest common denominator group. There are users who think like you describe, and there are users who do not. Also catering to people's existing (perhaps oversimple) mental models ensures those models never change. One of the PR issues with Firefox is that it has/had many features that suited the latter group, but decided to drop them to ape Chrome.