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There is, yes. You have three somewhat simple options for the search/url thing: 1) Have a single box, do not offer search suggestions. 2) Have a single box,
by bzbarsky 13y ago
There is, yes.
You have three somewhat simple options for the search/url thing:
1) Have a single box, do not offer search suggestions.
2) Have a single box, offer search suggestions for the
stuff users type in it.
3) Have separate boxes; offer search suggestions for the
stuff typed in the search box but not the stuff typed
in the url box.
#2 involves sending everything the user types in the url bar to the search suggestion provider to check for suggestions
Firefox does #3, because #2 is not considered acceptable from a user privacy perspective.
There are probably more complicated options here like only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL or something that might protect user privacy better than a straight up #2. But it gets easy to screw it up and leak private user data to the search provider....
- ajanuary 13y agoAnother option is to prefix searches. If I type "google " then start offering search suggestions. Chrome even has this, and a nice UX for it. It just unfortunately also has unprefixed searching.
- marcosdumay 13y agoWe can also make it bash compatible, and have all the GNU tools available at the address bar... (find www.wikipedia.com --title GNU)... But I don't think most people will be able to use it.
- aestra 13y ago>only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL How would this work? Lets say I wanted to search for Wikipedia, perhaps because I know there's news about it. How would Firefox know I was going to type "Wikipedia" and not "Wikipedia.com"?
- bzbarsky 13y agoYes, it's things like that that make this approach complicated and failure-prone. Which is why Firefox is not doing it.