another brain-dead 'feature' of all this is automatic URL parsing of search queries with a leading/trailing slash or colon. it's a victim of "all the ways for

another brain-dead 'feature' of all this is automatic URL parsing of search queries with a leading/trailing slash or colon. it's a victim of "all the ways for all the people", and it can't do either very well. The optimal middle ground for me was the separation between search query bar and URL bar. And why did we combine the two? Well, it was to reduce screen clutter and combine features so that we could make room for.... making the URL bar longer, generally far longer than any sensibly human-readable URL. Brilliant! (the REAL reason was because Chrome wanted to shovel people into Google Search as promptly as possible, and that started a Stupid Browser Trend that firefox got suckered into following.)