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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.)
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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).
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):
> 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".
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.
Family members for me, but they don't understand the difference between the windows search box in the task bar (next to the "start" button), and google. The difference between Chrome and google.com is lost on them as well.
It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.
They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.
I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.
The browser has a search bar at the top of the page; Amazon has a search bar at the top of the page.
Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.
To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.
You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.
Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.
The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).
Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.
A similar problem I’ve ran into both in tech support and user studies is momentary blindness for the scope of search. For example on your Mac, you have Spotlight, Finder search, Google search, help menu search, and various application-specific or website-specific search fields. In my experience if two of those are on screen at the same time, it’s very easy to get confused about which one to use to get which type of result.
You don’t need to be a naive user to make this mistake. The problem is that your brain is thinking “search”, your eyes are looking for something that looks like a search input, and when you find one you click it and start typing.
I feel like that’s what’s going wrong in this example too; it’s not that people expect Amazon to bring them to any random webpage, it’s just that there are two similar looking text inputs very close together on the screen.
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.
The author's thesis may be true: maybe people make this mistake all the time.
But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection.
In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, and it probably doesn't take many URLs being pasted in the search box to show up as automatic suggestions. One of the examples that pops up is "amzn.to/3tmosfj": how many people do we think searched for that url? A million people? Closer to a hundred people? Or was it one person, one time, out of a billion possible users?
I don't know the answer, but that's the point: nobody does. So, we can't draw conclusions from this example about how people use (or misuse) the search bar.
Long time ago (2006) I had a client who wanted their educational web-site (Provider of e-signature) to be created with user centric design first approach.
I had a vast interest in the topic due to my exposure to Nielsen Norman Group teachings and research based UX.
In one of the test I introduced a big search field positioned in the top of the screen with clear contrast as a starting UX point.
The test failed miserably. People rejected the notion that they must type, mostly of _fear_ of making a mistake.
As a result all the data suggested that the targeted audience will feel comfortable with "precompiled" list of important topics as a UX starting point. After carefully creating adequate structure I introduced 9 starting points and solved the problem. /Warning: Cyrillic / Retro UI/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trus...)
This was in the time when most of the users associated Internet with the blue "e" icon of Internet Explorer.
I think that this mindset is still present. Users in general are in the same space. Facebook icon replaced the IE icon successfully.
Mistakes happen. What am I supposed to deduce from the fact that Amazon engineers didn't remove those URLs from the suggestion data? That Amazon engineers can't differentiate search from URL either?
This seems like a very quick conclusion from the author. You don't know how many people have typed `https://www.amazon.co.uk`. Obviously typing the `https://www.a` would only show those possible completions, but how many times has it been entered really?
Not that I think most users are particularly computer literate, this just seems like a very weird anecdote to use as basis for a "ah! see???" blog post.
Just yesterday I witnessed my friend type a url into the google search bar (on the results page). She found what she was looking for, so I guess that's alright.
I think what's happening is people not understanding what http:// means. They think it's a magic invocation that one uses to tell computers "take me to the following". Maybe.
Anyway, I disagree with some other responses here -- good UI should help teach users what they need to know to navigate effectively. Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
If you believe it's possible to effectively use the web without knowing what a web site is or which web site you're on at any moment, then yes, you might design the omnibar and you might hide the URL details in the address bar. (Or if you benefit financially from people's ignorance.) But if you think users should know these things to effectively and safely navigate the web, then ideally your UI should not only empower knowledgeable users but help inform non-knowledgeable ones.
Am I the only one who likes the search/URL bar combined? It makes it easy to search, it searches through your bookmarks as well (giving bookmarks some priority), and auto-fills frequent website URLs quickly.
I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate. The URL bar isn't really under the site's control (although Web sites have more access to it, these days, than they used to).
If you can get users to interact with the elements directly under the site's control, then the site has ... more control.
Also, it's actually not a bad idea to have a "Swiss Army Knife" text entry. It's sort of what users expect. Couple that with advanced language parsing, and you can actually give users what they want.
My wife says I have "Google-Fu," because I'm so good at entering search queries that return relevant results.
Really, all I do, is enter a natural language phrase into the URL bar, and I get good results.
Well it is a nice feature of most applications that they will accept their app/domain URLs as an alternative to having it passed as a parameter by the OS.
I think it is discord that supports this. One app that doesn't is Zoom which makes you extract the meeting ID and password from the URL manually.
But in the OPs case I think the issue is users have alternative search engines and somehow URLs occasionally are 'prefetched' using incorrect search providers.
It's desperately out of fashion now, but remember having one's toolbar in the mode of "icons and text"? Giving you both the buttons, and a little label under each like "New", "Open", "Save", etc. Why not just have that in this case, ie. a little "URL" label under the address bar and a "Search" label under the other one. Even if a phrase like "URL" is jargon to a newbie, once they've seen it up there for long enough in context with actual URLs they'll pick up a feel for it. That's how straightforward user education used to work. We all had to be shown and told, that this thing is called this, and that thing is called that, at some point. Finally when these aids are no longer needed, and one cares to shave a few pixels off their toolbar, they just right-click -> "Show icons only", and carry on in new-found independence and style. How did this simple sequence of learning get so deprecated.
How many of us have had the inverse of this problem? We go to a browser's URL & search bar, and we paste in what we think is a URL...but then we failed to copy the "h" at the beginning so it regards the whole thing as a Google search for the remainder of our URL?
I'm sure tons of internal, proprietary URLs have been exposed this way.
Everyone reaches for the interesting explanation, but usually the actual explanation is much more mundane. Sure a small percentage won't understand the difference between the two search bars, but even power users who are working on a computer all day enter text in the wrong field. It just happens, and it's not that interesting.
[+] [-] cletus|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gmurphy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MauranKilom|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] everdrive|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notatoad|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|4 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sseagull|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fbelzile|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HWR_14|4 years ago|reply
Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamesfisher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
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
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.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] samsolomon|4 years ago|reply
Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.
[+] [-] 8ytecoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loeg|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] pronik|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdeck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbristow|4 years ago|reply
You can still enable the separate search bar in the settings if you want.
[+] [-] apatters|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 5-|4 years ago|reply
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#...
[+] [-] wolpoli|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosseloh|4 years ago|reply
"The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to."
"What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!"
These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browser and the new tab page's recently visited list gets cleared out...
[+] [-] 3np|4 years ago|reply
This learned helplessness scares me a bit. It's like the willingness to comprehend stops at "tap".
"What are you talking about, 'steering wheel'?! I'm not a greasemonkey, are you talking about the thing I turn to make the car turn?"
Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another.
[+] [-] nend|4 years ago|reply
It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.
They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.
I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.
[+] [-] baktubi|4 years ago|reply
Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.
To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.
You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.
Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.
The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).
Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.
[+] [-] krono|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobr|4 years ago|reply
You don’t need to be a naive user to make this mistake. The problem is that your brain is thinking “search”, your eyes are looking for something that looks like a search input, and when you find one you click it and start typing.
I feel like that’s what’s going wrong in this example too; it’s not that people expect Amazon to bring them to any random webpage, it’s just that there are two similar looking text inputs very close together on the screen.
[+] [-] phkahler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection.
In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, and it probably doesn't take many URLs being pasted in the search box to show up as automatic suggestions. One of the examples that pops up is "amzn.to/3tmosfj": how many people do we think searched for that url? A million people? Closer to a hundred people? Or was it one person, one time, out of a billion possible users?
I don't know the answer, but that's the point: nobody does. So, we can't draw conclusions from this example about how people use (or misuse) the search bar.
[+] [-] stayux|4 years ago|reply
I had a vast interest in the topic due to my exposure to Nielsen Norman Group teachings and research based UX. In one of the test I introduced a big search field positioned in the top of the screen with clear contrast as a starting UX point.
The test failed miserably. People rejected the notion that they must type, mostly of _fear_ of making a mistake.
As a result all the data suggested that the targeted audience will feel comfortable with "precompiled" list of important topics as a UX starting point. After carefully creating adequate structure I introduced 9 starting points and solved the problem. /Warning: Cyrillic / Retro UI/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080820012158/http://www.b-trus...)
This was in the time when most of the users associated Internet with the blue "e" icon of Internet Explorer.
I think that this mindset is still present. Users in general are in the same space. Facebook icon replaced the IE icon successfully.
[+] [-] remram|4 years ago|reply
This seems like a very quick conclusion from the author. You don't know how many people have typed `https://www.amazon.co.uk`. Obviously typing the `https://www.a` would only show those possible completions, but how many times has it been entered really?
Not that I think most users are particularly computer literate, this just seems like a very weird anecdote to use as basis for a "ah! see???" blog post.
[+] [-] vadfa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] picture|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|4 years ago|reply
Anyway, I disagree with some other responses here -- good UI should help teach users what they need to know to navigate effectively. Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
If you believe it's possible to effectively use the web without knowing what a web site is or which web site you're on at any moment, then yes, you might design the omnibar and you might hide the URL details in the address bar. (Or if you benefit financially from people's ignorance.) But if you think users should know these things to effectively and safely navigate the web, then ideally your UI should not only empower knowledgeable users but help inform non-knowledgeable ones.
[+] [-] simpleguitar|4 years ago|reply
I remember when google made the URL bar as a search bar. It had the convenience factor, and google had the "search for everything" philosophy.
But we call that a "dark pattern" now.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
If you can get users to interact with the elements directly under the site's control, then the site has ... more control.
Also, it's actually not a bad idea to have a "Swiss Army Knife" text entry. It's sort of what users expect. Couple that with advanced language parsing, and you can actually give users what they want.
My wife says I have "Google-Fu," because I'm so good at entering search queries that return relevant results.
Really, all I do, is enter a natural language phrase into the URL bar, and I get good results.
[+] [-] KingMachiavelli|4 years ago|reply
I think it is discord that supports this. One app that doesn't is Zoom which makes you extract the meeting ID and password from the URL manually.
But in the OPs case I think the issue is users have alternative search engines and somehow URLs occasionally are 'prefetched' using incorrect search providers.
[+] [-] justusthane|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balozi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CmdrKrool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkLowenstein|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure tons of internal, proprietary URLs have been exposed this way.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|4 years ago|reply