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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

#351

Post by Gigachad »

rmah wrote: post #172
londons_explore wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know i…

IIRC, chokes are only necessary with carburetors to control the fuel/air mixture. I think today's cars are all fuel injection and thus don't need to have a choke. Cheaper gas powered garden equipment still has chokes, I think.

So now its all computerized. You don't get a knob on the dash to personalize exactly how much fuel to air you want. The OEM sets that and you go on about your day without ever caring.

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

#352

Post by joshuamorton »

Majromax wrote: post #268
iforgotpassword wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone numbers are stored in your phone's contacts app, a tool that does the remembering for you. Making an input box do two different things and then adding a heuristic to guess what the user wants might be handy, but can go wrong. And then, as the linked post demonstrates, users get used to that and treat every input box as if it can do both of these things. It's a race to the bottom. Now your users "got stupider" a…

> Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car. At the same time, nobody ever questions what you don't learn to drive a car. You have one acceleration pedal; you don't have separate controls for the fuel/air mixture and ignition timings. You don't manually control the differential. You have one brake pedal, not separate ones for the front and rear brakes, and automatic anti-lock braking is even a usefu…

You have an automatic transmission, so you don't have to know how to use the clutch (a thing people used to complain about the kids not learning)

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

#353

Post by gorgoiler »

Reminds me of Ed Balls Day:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls#Ed_Balls_Day

In 2011 [celebrity UK politician] Balls accidentally entered his intended search term in the wrong box and sent a tweet reading only "Ed Balls". The tweet was retweeted by thousands and has never been deleted.

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

#354

Post by joshuamorton »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #146
londons_explore wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control. Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning. People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know i…

Bad example. Choke lever was a control device that became unnecessary as technology made the relevant part of the process fully automatic, and it was completely incidental to the overall purpose of a car - to move people places. Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.

This is only true if you assume that differentiating between a url and a search query. In a sense, a url (or uri) is just a specific type of query.

We could equivalently ask why ftp and http and https and such don't have different types of entry uis, since they're different protocols. If we consider the "resource location via plain language" protocol (which we could even formalize!) that defers to http(s), ftp, Tor, and Bing based on aspects of the request, it's just one higher level protocol.

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

#355

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design."

Not considering Mozilla's "business model" is forwarding searches by default to Yahoo/Google for a price. Would be surprising if the search engine website contracting with Mozilla did not have an expectation that the Firefox UI would be conducive to submitting as many default "searches" as possible, whether intentionally or not. (User could type an address in the search bar and it would be forwarded to Google. She now has a Google cookie.) Would also be surprising if there was not a similar expectation that the Firefox settings UI make it relatively unlikely that users would change the search engine defaults.

Chrome's design is good for Google. More so than Firefox's design is good for [search engine partner]. For users who do not want to be accidentally sending queries to Google, the "Omnibox" design sucks. It also is incorrect in that it defeats the notion of what is and what is not a valid domain name or a valid URL. It does not educate users about the www, it allows them to stay ignorant. Would not be surprising if that is how Google views its users and prefers that they remain unaware of what is happening.

For example, look at how Google descibes the NID cookie. They are not lying but they are repeatedly suggesting that its most signifcant purpose is a user's configuration preferences. However its primary purpose is for advertising. A fully informed user with choice over consent is apparently not what Google wants.

https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US

The primary purpose of the "omnibox " is not to benefit the user (although it may do so for some users), it is to benefit Google's "business model" of collecting data about users and selling online ad services.

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

#356

Post by krater23 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #331
8ytecoder wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why exactly should the interrnet accessible for all people at all? When you are too lazy or dumb to use a browser like it was in 2000, you will too think that facebook or insta are the internet. Thats the problem on today's internet. It's too accessible for too many ignorant people.

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

#357

Post by gmurphy »

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 designed[1] the Chrome Omnibox, and appreciate a lot of the conjecture in this thread and other places - I wish I was as devious as many people assume we were.

The short version is that while many users can differentiate, it's more a problem of WHEN they differentiate - Chrome's entire design philosophy was around speed, and the omnibox was designed so that we had a simple destination that a user could focus on when they had decided to go somewhere else, but before they had decided WHERE they wanted to go to or HOW they were going to get there, and then make it so they wouldn't have to think about the HOW. If their search term autocompleted to a URL so they don't have to go through search, that was a win. This same philosophy was what drove putting the most visited pages on the New Tab Page (which was a blank page in most browsers at the time).

Some users plan out their actions before they take them, but I wanted to make everything as streamlined as possible so you could interact with Chrome as you thought about what you wanted, and not making you wait until after.

[1] I was the designer and occasional engineer, but the entire team takes the credit - everyone was behind the idea from before we even started work on Chrome, and many smart people deserve more credit than I do for how good it ended up being.

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

#358

Post by krater23 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #352
Majromax wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car. At the same time, nobody ever questions what you don't learn to drive a car. You have one acceleration pedal; you don't have separate controls for the fuel/air mixture and ignition timings. You don't manually control the differential. You have one brake pedal, not separate ones for the front and rear brakes, and automatic anti-lock braking is even a usefu…

You have an automatic transmission, so you don't have to know how to use the clutch (a thing people used to complain about the kids not learning)

Just US things... No one in Germany likes automatic transmission.

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

#359

Post by apatters »

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 find it interesting that the discussion about this feature is only about design/interaction principles.

I mean, maybe this is right and a merged search/URL bar is the best call from a design standpoint. I don't mind having one.

But do you really think that's why Google implemented a feature in Chrome that sends more people to Google?

It was, I'm sure, a revenue decision first and foremost, and Google is probably delighted when people identify it as something else.

The same logic applies just as well for any browser vendor who makes money off of search partners.

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

#360

Post by jhanschoo »

krater23 wrote: post #356
jhanschoo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why exactly should the interrnet accessible for all people at all? When you are too lazy or dumb to use a browser like it was in 2000, you will too think that facebook or insta are the internet. Thats the problem on today's internet. It's too accessible for too many ignorant people.

I don't see the point of your argument. I don't see any reason for excluding people who "think that facebook or insta are the internet" from it. If you desperately require more powerful tools to support the way you use the internet then there are powerful tools available; why use the lowest-common-denominator tool that is the browser?

I couldn't resist adapting your argument for food:

Why exactly should food be accessible for all people at all? When you are too lazy or dumb to grow your own food like it was before the coming of Jesus, you will think that McD's is the agriculture industry. That's the problem with today's agriculture. It's too accessible for too many ignorant people.

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