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Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

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

#331

Post by jhanschoo »

8ytecoder wrote: post #246
II2II wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Why should the Internet be accessible only to people who have undergone a high school curriculum that teaches it? That already excludes a large portion of the population.

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

#332

Post by kaetemi »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #200
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…

> 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.)

I type f, see Facebook, hit enter, and by the time I hit enter, Firefox swapped the history result with some search autocomplete that's not helpful at all.

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

#333

Post by megous »

samsolomon wrote: post #233
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…

This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct. Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.

ctrl+k and I know I'll be searching in a web search engine ctrl+l and I know I'll be opening an URL and if the domain doesn't exist it will fail

I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever.

Having to type https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones.

Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no.

So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case.

I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.

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

#334

Post by google234123 »

bantunes wrote: post #158
Mikeb85 wrote: post #127

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.

You're not in the percentage of users that has a problem with it (that I'd put in the high 70s or 80s).

I'd put in the high 0.70s or 0.80s

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

#335

Post by climb_stealth »

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…

Thank you for posting this! I agree.

Address bar: I know what I want and I want it to only search in bookmarks and history.

Search bar: I don't quite know what I want and I want to open an internet search for it. And possibly give suggestions from actual search results.

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'm somewhat bracing myself for it to go away eventually.

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

#336

Post by Izkata »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #276
unsui wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking like a HN reader, rather than the intended audience for the chrome omnibar (i.e., non-specialists) They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically bec…

> They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings... > Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction (...) Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because c…

> Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world.

There was a subtle joke about this in Star Trek: The Next Generation: Wesley Crusher, on a visit to a starbase to take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam, stood in front of a door confused until Picard used the handle to open it for him. Wesley had grown up on starships where the doors opened automatically as you approach, and had never seen a door handle before.

According to Wesley's actor, this wasn't in the script and they came up with it right before doing the scene (and it made it into the episode).

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

#337

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

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

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

#338

Post by dhosek »

freediver wrote: post #134
dhosek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big challenge I have with this is that while the Safari bar is at the bottom, search within sites (say, Wikipedia) is still at the top. This ends up making it harder for me to redevelop muscle memory for searches/urls at the bottom

Position of address bar is an option you can change.

The thing is, I think having the address bar at the bottom makes a lot of sense on the phone.

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

#339

Post by cblconfederate »

3np wrote: post #44
rosseloh wrote: post #35

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.

Tech has gone to great lengths to convince people to be illiterate. "There's an app for that" was the worse form of handicap and users were heavily incentivized to seek premade solutions rather than trying to solve their own problems

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

#340

Post by musicale »

Maybe we should use simpler pathnames in web browsers. I'd be fine with something logical like:

/com/ycombinator/news/every-search-bar-looks-like-a-url-bar-to-users.html

That would be closer to Linux/macOS/Windows pathnames, which many users will have encountered before.

For new paths you could use an incremental lookup scheme to reduce data leakage via typos, and previously used prefixes could be cached for speed.

Personally I'd be fine if search entries required an explicit '?' and if search autocompletion was turned off by default.

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