<story><title>Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/every-search-bar-looks-like-a-url-bar-to-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MauranKilom</author><text>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. &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; 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&amp;#x27;t know what users want). That&amp;#x27;s why I personally prefer the ability to make that choice explicitly.&lt;p&gt;I get it, I&amp;#x27;m not the kind of user this article is about. And maybe I&amp;#x27;m just insufficiently exposed to the other paradigm to have become &amp;quot;fluent&amp;quot; in it. But I just wanted to point out that there &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; are users whose mental model differentiates search terms and URLs.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox&amp;#x27;s design decision makes sense. You don&amp;#x27;t want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you&amp;#x27;re not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg &amp;quot;go&amp;#x2F;foo&amp;quot; can be a URL internally).&lt;p&gt;But users don&amp;#x27;t care about any of that. Users don&amp;#x27;t have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome&amp;#x27;s decision was correct. It&amp;#x27;s surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot;. Tech-savvy people will just type &amp;quot;facebook.com&amp;quot; but users will just search for &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.&lt;p&gt;So the lesson is don&amp;#x27;t leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don&amp;#x27;t care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>climb_stealth</author><text>Thank you for posting this! I agree.&lt;p&gt;Address bar: I know what I want and I want it to only search in bookmarks and history.&lt;p&gt;Search bar: I don&amp;#x27;t quite know what I want and I want to open an internet search for it. And possibly give suggestions from actual search results.&lt;p&gt;Separating the address and search bars is the first thing I do when I set up a new Firefox. I hope it will stay around but I&amp;#x27;m somewhat bracing myself for it to go away eventually.</text></comment>
<story><title>Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/every-search-bar-looks-like-a-url-bar-to-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MauranKilom</author><text>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. &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; 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&amp;#x27;t know what users want). That&amp;#x27;s why I personally prefer the ability to make that choice explicitly.&lt;p&gt;I get it, I&amp;#x27;m not the kind of user this article is about. And maybe I&amp;#x27;m just insufficiently exposed to the other paradigm to have become &amp;quot;fluent&amp;quot; in it. But I just wanted to point out that there &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; are users whose mental model differentiates search terms and URLs.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox&amp;#x27;s design decision makes sense. You don&amp;#x27;t want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you&amp;#x27;re not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg &amp;quot;go&amp;#x2F;foo&amp;quot; can be a URL internally).&lt;p&gt;But users don&amp;#x27;t care about any of that. Users don&amp;#x27;t have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome&amp;#x27;s decision was correct. It&amp;#x27;s surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot;. Tech-savvy people will just type &amp;quot;facebook.com&amp;quot; but users will just search for &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.&lt;p&gt;So the lesson is don&amp;#x27;t leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don&amp;#x27;t care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unethical_ban</author><text>FYI in Firefox you can revert to the correct, two-box implementation by checking &amp;quot;Settings &amp;gt; Search&amp;quot; . You can get two boxes back, and you can turn off search suggestions in the address bar.</text></comment>