51–60 of 151 posts
> Besides exact matches, prefix matches come first. Google Maps used to do this, and when I entered "9831 Main St, Funky Town" once and a day later I would not remember the street number. Entering "Main" would not give me what I wanted. Google Maps does what I want now AFAICT and entering "Main" will return "9831 Main St, Funky Town" first.
Agree with a lot of these, particularly the ones that prevent misclicks (changing the data "underneath you" when you have something else selected, or "enter" doing something unexpected). However, strongly disagree with the sorting and preference guidelines. In general the autocomplete should match the intention of what the user is trying to accomplish which is going to vary widely depending on context. Sometimes that…
So I could type
foo.com/sig
And I see/tab through the route for foo.com/sign-in or signup or whatever the server has available.
We’d need an agreed endpoint for browsers to query (.well-known/routes?) and some implementations to automatically / easily generate the routes, but it doesn’t seem unfeasible
The best autocompletion I've seen is on Wikipedia - no frills, and extremely accurate. If only all services were like this.
So, here is the thing. Modern browsers (at least Firefox and Chromium, haven't tried the others in a while) have AWESOME autocomplete widgets for their URL bars. They incorporate multiple data sources (URLs and page titles from history, bookmarks, the search engine's keyword autocompletion, probably more), build statistical models (when I start typing "y" I want to go to Youtube 95% of the time, so suggest that first…
1: Once they are in, you have to support them forever. Or you will break the few websites that use them.
2: Almost nobody uses them. Try 10 popular websites and chances are you will not see a single native dropdown. You might not even see something as simple as a native radio button.
I think it's better to get the basics right instead of building more and more 'userland' type of functionality into the browser itself.
here's my pet peeve: its the omnibox in google chrome. it only chooses prefix-lengthening matches if I am on guardian.co.uk/au I can find sub-spaces under this. I also visit guardian.co.uk/uk but I cannot be told about it by google omnibox rules. But, URL forms are syntactically bound, the /... is well understood to identify a base-URL and sister URLs. The stringmatch logic should show me at least some of my sisters…
The conspiracytheorist in me thinks Chrome's address bar is intenionally crippled to make you do a Google search instead. It's so so different from how well it works in Firefox. It also breaks the rule in the article about not selecting the suggestion for you. When I start typing in Chrome it fills my whole bar with a suggested url that matches. I end up pressing esc to remove the last highlighted/completed part, but…
So, here is the thing. Modern browsers (at least Firefox and Chromium, haven't tried the others in a while) have AWESOME autocomplete widgets for their URL bars. They incorporate multiple data sources (URLs and page titles from history, bookmarks, the search engine's keyword autocompletion, probably more), build statistical models (when I start typing "y" I want to go to Youtube 95% of the time, so suggest that first…
There are two problems with adding widgets to browsers: 1: Once they are in, you have to support them forever. Or you will break the few websites that use them. 2: Almost nobody uses them. Try 10 popular websites and chances are you will not see a single native dropdown. You might not even see something as simple as a native radio button. I think it's better to get the basics right instead of building more and more '…
I'd argue that's because the native widgets haven't changed much since I've started using computers around 1994 (probably longer), and simply aren't up to the modern standards anymore.
If there was a native widget that worked better than any of the current javascript-enhanced widget and could be styled to fit the website around it, lots of people would use it. Maybe not the top 50 web pages in world, but lots of developers with lower budgets would.
I would love autocomplete in URLs I haven’t visited before. Eg my browser should be able to query foo.com for all its available urls and let me search / filter through them via autocomplete. So I could type foo.com/sig And I see/tab through the route for foo.com/sign-in or signup or whatever the server has available. We’d need an agreed endpoint for browsers to query (.well-known/routes?) and some implementations to…
I would love autocomplete in URLs I haven’t visited before. Eg my browser should be able to query foo.com for all its available urls and let me search / filter through them via autocomplete. So I could type foo.com/sig And I see/tab through the route for foo.com/sign-in or signup or whatever the server has available. We’d need an agreed endpoint for browsers to query (.well-known/routes?) and some implementations to…
I’m not sure if they fixed this in newer versions but jeez is that bad UX