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"Someday, I suspect, browsers will dump their search fields and just use the address bar for everything." Google Chrome does that; personally I love it. (When

by hernan7 18y ago

"Someday, I suspect, browsers will dump their search fields and just use the address bar for everything." Google Chrome does that; personally I love it. (When I go back to Firefox I always resent having to press an extra tab to go to the search field.)

briansmith 18y ago
Everything old is new again. The first browser to do this was IE 6 (or maybe even 5). People didn't get it (it wasn't discoverable enough), and people complained that the browser was helping Microsoft spy on them. Google only improved the UI a little and made Google the default instead of MSN search.
- volida 18y ago
  this proofs why ui is important
- noblethrasher 18y ago
  IE5 had an add-in (a power toy I think) that allowed you to create a string as a shortcut to a search engine so you could type something like the following into the address field: g:foo and do a google search for 'foo'.
- joshsharp 18y ago
  Agreed. When everyone was moving to Firefox because it was 'lighter weight', I stuck with the Mozilla suite because one of the things I liked was searching from the address bar. And this was years ago. It's ironic that the same people criticising the Mozilla browser for being 'clumsier' are now praising Chrome for being more streamlined.
tremendo 18y ago
To each his/her own. I prefer Firefox's ctrl-K for the search box. and get frustrated by Chrome's insistence on giving me search results for a domain I type in the address bar after I press ctrl-Enter to automatically asume a dot-com (shift-Enter for .net or ctrl-shift-Enter for .org). I love Chrome's visual cues for in-page search results. If only they'd implement incremental search like Opera and Firefox (and Vim): '/'+search, instead of the more cumbersome c-F.
mmj 18y ago
I remove the search bar in Firefox and just use the address bar for searches. It searches Google and if the result is popular enough it goes directly to that page.

by hernan7 18y ago

briansmith 18y ago

Everything old is new again. The first browser to do this was IE 6 (or maybe even 5). People didn't get it (it wasn't discoverable enough), and people complained that the browser was helping Microsoft spy on them. Google only improved the UI a little and made Google the default instead of MSN search.

volida 18y ago
this proofs why ui is important
noblethrasher 18y ago
IE5 had an add-in (a power toy I think) that allowed you to create a string as a shortcut to a search engine so you could type something like the following into the address field: g:foo and do a google search for 'foo'.
joshsharp 18y ago
Agreed. When everyone was moving to Firefox because it was 'lighter weight', I stuck with the Mozilla suite because one of the things I liked was searching from the address bar. And this was years ago. It's ironic that the same people criticising the Mozilla browser for being 'clumsier' are now praising Chrome for being more streamlined.

tremendo 18y ago

To each his/her own. I prefer Firefox's ctrl-K for the search box. and get frustrated by Chrome's insistence on giving me search results for a domain I type in the address bar after I press ctrl-Enter to automatically asume a dot-com (shift-Enter for .net or ctrl-shift-Enter for .org). I love Chrome's visual cues for in-page search results. If only they'd implement incremental search like Opera and Firefox (and Vim): '/'+search, instead of the more cumbersome c-F.

mmj 18y ago

I remove the search bar in Firefox and just use the address bar for searches. It searches Google and if the result is popular enough it goes directly to that page.