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…
>For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead Press space? Not every use case has to be addressed by UI elements, especially when we're talking about edge cases
Especially considering if it really grinds your gears, you can have your search and address bar be discrete pretty trivially.
> (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.) I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to se…
> Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) This is _massively_ shifting the goalposts. From a personal user perspective, the privacy issues are pretty much the entirety of the problem with Facebook. But you're also missing the fact that Facebook _itself_ is A Bad Thing for the world, even if it is locally useful as a product. The parent commenter is presumably saying that it w…
The privacy issues don't actually bother me much because they're just being used to serve ads that I'm going to block anyways. I'm also sort of jaded when it comes to online privacy and operate under the assumption that every website and every device I use is trying to collect as much data about me as they can, and that the battle for privacy has been lost. I'll just run uBlock Origin to block the ads and most of the tracking.
> Even if _you_ unfollow your racist uncle, he's continuing to use the platform to hear and spread more racist invective.
They will ALWAYS have a platform, whether its Facebook, Parler, Gab, or Voat. It doesn't matter to me if they're on the same platform as me if I don't see it.
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. UR…
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?)
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 addre…
> believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking). Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction a…
Re vim: As a hobby developer (a perpetual newbie) the learning curve is an issue for me simply because I don’t yet understand the value in overcoming the curve. “Efficiency” is not one of my programming goals, and so reasons like “vim is great - it’s super fast” have no appeal. So, remembering 80 unintuitive shortcuts just so I can do what I do in Kate, but a little faster? Eh…
On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "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 browse…
> I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. 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.
It's really because most adults don't have time to tinker like we did, being children and adolescents with computers. When I grew up in the windows xp era, I became the family tech support, and not because I was smart or anything. Just because I had time on my hands, being a child with little responsibilities compared to my parents, to go through the control panel and click every single button and option just to see what it did, so when something did go wrong I had some idea to guess where the fix was to be found. Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't mess things up more often. Fast forward to today, and there is a lot of common software that I struggle with like my parents did 20 years ago because I don't have the time to fiddle like I did 20 years ago. I can't do much of anything on windows anymore, after years of using macos and unix, that knowledge has left my brain and I don't have the time to get it all back.
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. UR…
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 addre…
Why can't we teach this in schools? My high school curriculum covered the basics of the UI elements - window, menu bar, URL and such - in addition to OpenOffice and the basics about internet (this was 1998)
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. UR…
Chrome's omnibar was designed to allow Google to MITM every web request, not to simplify things for the user.
Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.
On phone support calls I usually can't even get people who know what a URL, URL bar, or even a search bar, is in the first place. "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 browse…
This is my mom. Trying to walk her through steps on the phone like logins and lost passwords is a nightmare. I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
at least today you can share your screen on zoom and demo what you are talking about
> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" 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.)
> (Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.) I'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to se…
I think the biggest issue with Facebook I've learned recently is that on the margin their algorithms push you towards seeing things that increases their engagement numbers. I think it's hard to understand the effect on you from having every recommended item slightly not what you were asking for in the direction of making you mad.
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. UR…
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 addre…
They should have basic knowledge, but they won't. The majority of people in the world can barely use computers well at all, and we need to work with this reality.