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Comment by taylorbuley | Hacker News Reader

Around the launch of IE9 beta I asked Dean Hachamovitch (IE honcho at MSFT) what he thought about people typing random things (besides URLs) into the navigation bar. I'd noticed not entirely tech-savvy people in my life using the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience, using it for new searches, history exploration, etc.

Hachamovitch reminded me that this was not really a new thing, as people have been using the command line since the dawn of time. Never did this really sink in until I saw this demo: The URL bar is a command line for the people. Behold its power.

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Aza Raskin (and about half of Humanized who had come with him) was working on getting this into Firefox. He worked on some other stuff and then left for another company, but you can get the idea from here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tut... and a very impressive video: http://vimeo.com/1561578

The architecture was pretty far along, completely extensible with new verbs and parsers in JS. They'd got rid of the ugly hyphens from that demo video with a better parser. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/0.2_Design:_UI_and_Se... They'd even solved most of the localization problems, like verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object, and pronouns, and stuff. I really would like to see this revisited sometime.

It's still being worked on by the community, there is a build from 2011-01-27.

https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/03/10/community-mainta...

I still use and love this tool every day.

Entirely tech-savvy people use the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience also. Chrome enables this fantastically.

My favourite is the domain tab completion automatic site search recognition thing. Chrome users know what I'm talking about. It's fantastic.

EDIT: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/tab-to-search

Basically I can type the first few characters of a domain until it autocompletes, then hit tab, then enter a search term which is submitted to that site's own search form, which chrome picked up when I went to the site, using various heuristics.

This is good, but not nearly as good as manually setting single character "keywords" for common searches.

use the search enough times and you can use single character+ <tab>

Works well until you want to distinguish between searching en.wikipedia.org and en.wiktionary.org.

(While writing this I realized I didn't actually remember the exact domain Wikipedia and Wiktionary used... so I ran a "test" search on both.)

Coding Horror: "The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line"

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/05/the-web-browser-add...

The Location Field is the new Command Line: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field

http://yubnub.org could be used from address bar for some commands to be browser-independent (portable).

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