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Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#291

Post by denton-scratch »

dylan604 wrote: post #286
denton-scratch wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I was talking about; pretty good example, except the missing protocol and "://". I'm remembering the difficulty of explaining what is a forward slash and what is a backward slash. After all, they both lean forward - one leads with its feet, the other with its head. It doesn't help if your contact is using a different keyboard from you. You have to keep asking them to read it back to you. I still have to…

Just hope you never need to get someone over the phone to visit slashdot

Why would I do that? :-)

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#292

Post by solveit »

HWR_14 wrote: post #275
solveit wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation, school can't teach anything. Most of your high school class don't remember what DNS is.

DNS? Is that a high school level subject?

I was going to say something about how you needed to know what DNS is to know how URLs work and how all this is easily teachable at the high school level, but I realized I'm just out of touch. Amend my comment to say that the previous poster's classmates can't tell apart a search bar and a URL bar either.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#293

Post by ryantgtg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #278
ryantgtg wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> “Efficiency” is not one of my programming goals, and so reasons like “vim is great - it’s super fast” have no appeal. Then think in terms of friction - friction that prevents you from doing what you want. The reason for pursuing this kind of efficiency in an editor is because the task of writing and editing text files is only means to an end as a programmer: your goal is to encode the program you have in your head…

Thanks. I think I’m just not at a programming level where my brain is working faster than my fingers. But I get it. I can relate in the following case: I like to write fiction, and lately I have been writing children’s stories that I’ve told my daughter as I put her to bed. I’ve found that I can invent and tell a pretty decent story in the span of 10 minutes. When I later write up that story, it takes me 1.5-2 hours. Adding in punctuation seems to slow me down the most, in part because those non-story elements distract me and mess up my flow. I’m testing whether it’s faster to use a voice to text app, and then edit in the punctuation at the end.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#294

Post by xyzelement »

Majromax wrote: post #272
xyzelement wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This learned helplessness scares me a bit... Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another. As a matter of personal philosophy, I agree - but on the level of "empathy for users" this misses the mark pretty widely. The 'steering wheel' analogy is not applicable (but funny!) because unlike computers, everyone who drives has been licensed so there's a baseline level of education that isn't…

> Also, most people (at least in the US) grew up around cars, so you expect a 20 year old and a 70 year old to grasp what a steering wheel is. For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.

> For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.

That's exactly right, the car industry has done a remarkable job maintaining interface compatibility for over a century despite massive implementation changes.

Someone who knew how to "hit the brakes" on a 1908 Model-T will be able to do it in my 2021 Toyota. Despite the fact that my car has regenerative breaking (and ABS and other things) which means that how the pedal does its thing is totally different.

Even the new additions over the basic interface feel pretty optional. EG, my car has radar cruise control but someone can drive the car for 10 years and not notice that button. If you want to drive my car the same way you drove the Model-T, you pretty much can.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#295

Post by npteljes »

picture wrote: post #2

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.

To be honest, this is a way to avoid phishing too. Type facebook into a search engine and click the first result. Otherwise, on a sleepy morning, one might go to faecbok.com, and happily give away their credentials.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#296

Post by dylan604 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #291
dylan604 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hope you never need to get someone over the phone to visit slashdot

Why would I do that? :-)

for the lulz? it's almost like one of those old skool prank caller kind of bits. you could drive someone batty if you could hold it together long enough

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#297

Post by WorldMaker »

MauranKilom wrote: post #160
cletus wrote: post #145

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…

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…

The power user thing in most "omnibars" that's been around for a long time at this point is that if you prefix search queries with a question mark ? you get an explicit search behavior (with your default search provider) and for instance auto-complete doesn't show recent URLs anymore.

Firefox (and Edge; don't know about Chrome as I don't use it) still have the concept of "Search Keywords" that you can prefix searches with to get into search modes for against specific non-default search providers. For instance in the Firefox bar you can type @wikipedia and go directly to a Wikipedia Search mode.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#298

Post by WorldMaker »

pronik wrote: post #285
cletus wrote: post #145

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 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…

Prefix one word searches with a question mark and then space ("? ") will always search in Firefox. Old Power User trick from decades ago even when Firefox still had a split search box by default. (There's also search keywords to force it to search with a non-default search provider such as starting a search with "@wikipedia " to search Wikipedia.)

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#299

Post by WorldMaker »

8ytecoder wrote: post #243
cletus wrote: post #145

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?)

Yes, Firefox was one of the first to define the "omni" bar experience, but one of the slowest to remove (by default) a dedicated search box even after they proved most users were using the "omni" bar.

Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

#300

Post by coldtea »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #111
bierjunge wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-15 years ago a lot of people were saying, that the "digital native" generation will be tech savvy and will surpass everyone with their IT knowledge. Yeah, right. A few months back in 2021 I was asked how to "make an app on the phone". Not FOR a phone, ON a phone, the complete development only using a phone. WTF? And no, it wasn't a 12 year old kid, it was a 21 year old guy with a Bachelor of science degree.

> Yeah, right. A few months back in 2021 I was asked how to "make an app on the phone". Not FOR a phone, ON a phone, the complete development only using a phone. WTF? You jest, but it's possible. There is an Android IDE that includes a compiler that runs on Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...

Yes, and there are also coding environment apps that go all the way from coding to the app store in iOS.

But in this case it's 99% more likely that the person asking didn't have these in mind, but just misunderstood what it takes to make a regular mobile app and though it obvious that regular mobile app development happens on the phones themselves.

So they were correct by accident, and only because there are some niche environments very few actual apps - and no major one - were ever made on. So it's like being correct that there are aligators in Australia, but not because normally there would be as local fauna (which is what you had in mind, confusing them with crocodiles), but because it happened that some actual aligators escaped from some zoo and procreated in the wild outback.

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