Mozilla Labs: The Location Bar Has To Go | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Labs: The Location Bar Has To Go

conceivablytech.com

71 pointspeternorton99 comments

I vociferously oppose removing the URL bar for novice web users.

Because where did the intermediate users come from? They were novice users who somewhere along the way figured out what URLs were. And part of that learning process is having them staring you in the face every day.

Yes they're geeky. But they're also fucking powerful. And the world is better because we have intermediate users who use them. Not developers, but computer savvy, regular people who seriously make good use of URLs.

Hiding them is a terrible idea. Not until we have a replacement that fixes the usability/confusion issues without throwing away the immense power.

I have been using Chrome at work every day since it first came out and Safari at home since it first came out. I long for the day that Safari drops the extra search bar. I am forever typing into the wrong one.

Why have two search boxes when a regular expression can easily and accurately decipher what you are searching for?

Why does having two types of bar add anything but noise to lives of even the most advanced users (of which I include myself)?

The URL bar is a relic akin to the human appendix or tail-bone.

Begone.

I agree with your thoughts on the 2 bars being wasteful, but we shouldn't abandon the url bar entirely. Sure give it double function (search and direct url), but eliminating it entirely seems like jumping the gun.

this seems like a conniving way to drive more traffic to google.com so people like my parents will then type in the urls they already know into google's search box

If you type a couple words into the Safari URL bar, you are likely to get an error page. Type those into the Chrome bar, you get a search for the terms. Type a real URL into either one, and you go there. Which is preferable, a search or an error page? It's not conniving, it's convenient.

I agree that it's nice to have the URL bar double as the search bar. I've been patiently waiting for Apple to combine them in Safari so I don't have to remember two very different keyboard commands for getting to them.

Safari could also use the Chrome-style status bar overlay.

I share your frustration (wrong word for such a minor discomfort, but anyway) with the two fields in Safari, and I'm often asking myself why Apple hasn't combined them.

I can think of two reasons:

For beginners having 'address is the square box on the left and search is the rounded box on the right' is the sort of simplification Apple likes to bake into their products.

The other is 'The bit of the internet you are looking at is in the square box, and the 3rd party app for search called Google is over there in that rounded box (where it should stay)'.

Both make sense to me if I put on my Apple mindreader hat... although I may be being a bit too cynical with my second reason.

Don't you people know why it is 2 fields ? One to send to the search engine provider and one to NOT send to the searchengine provider if you know exactly where you are going. That is why Mozilla didn't combine them and that is why Google did.

It doesn't have to go to the search engine provider if it's combined. Just regexp match a URL, and if it's a URL, go right there.

With autocompletion it will send every part while you type to the search-engine: p, po, por, porn, porns, pornsi, pornsit, pornsite, pornsite., pornsite.c ohhh, the user meant a URL, I'll stop sending it to the searchengine provider.

At the risk of sounding a bit snarky, don't you know what an execute command is?

Type a search string into a 'universal' field and hit enter = perform a search.

Type a URL into a 'universal' field and hit enter = go to that URL.

Use some refined heuristics to determine the intention (ala the AwesomeBar in Firefox) and you've got the best of both worlds.

I don't use Firefox/Chrome daily, so I may be missing something, but I don't see why a dual address/search field needs to communicate with Google to be combined.

Do you know what discoverability is ? Really how do users know ? It has to be obvious or users won't use it/understand or even discover it.

A large part of the reason Firefox chose to keep them separate is for privacy. Everything you type into the search bar is sent to Google--even before you hit enter--for autocomplete purposes. The Firefox team felt that many privacy-conscious users trusted that the URL bar doesn't send info until they hit enter.

I use Firefox, I love the two search bars. ctrl+L to get navigation, ctrl+K to get search. ctrl+up/down to change which site I want to search, which saves me a good chunk of time in the long run. I'm not opposed to hiding them though, as long as they're still there and show up when I type my keyboard commands. I don't think the https issue is too hard to work around either: just show a lock next to the tab's icon.

Opera allows you to search from the URL bar, and customize these searches. By default, you can type "w foo" to search wikipedia, "g bar" to search Google, etc. You can also very easily remove the search bar, which is separate by default.

"Quicksearches" in Firefox work exactly like that, too.

"The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space. Secondly, it’s hard to read, since people don’t really understand URLs. Moreover, it’s modal: it has a mode for displaying the current page’s location and a mode for entering your next destination.”

1. What is the panic with space on monitors? Stop making everything at 1080 widescreen TV.

2. If you cannot read an URL then I guess sending links to others in email, IM, or Facebook is too hard as well. Heck, how are you even going to share the URL? Some kind of drag and drop that people will have to learn even exists?

3. It has more than one mode? Like old TV sets that had a dial to tell you what channel you were on, yet could be set to another channel by turning it? The bar already as been turned into a search, and URL bar. So we already dropped from two entry points to one.

Firefox still has the search box because it's where the majority of their revenue comes from. I suppose now they'll have a search box but no location bar?

Firefox has a search box because it's helpful to users. Period. End of story. If it's not helpful to users, it'll go away or be replaced. Mozilla does not build features to generate money. Mozilla builds features to make the Web a better place for users and developers.

But that particular feature generates them millions of dollars and is their primary source of funding. It's not far fetched to imagine if it came down to it, issues surrounding it might be more complex than other UI issues.

Defaulting to google generates millions, but it's there in the first place because it's useful.

It's a much bigger waste of space than the location bar, especially when keyword searches are much more flexible.

> 2. If you cannot read an URL then I guess sending links to others in email, IM, or Facebook is too hard as well. Heck, how are you even going to share the URL? Some kind of drag and drop that people will have to learn even exists?

First part: Non sequitur.

Second part: A "copy link" function either as a button or a context menu action lets people do exactly what you described. Still no need to see the url all the time.

I think "the panic with space on monitors" is driven by the proliferation of smart phones and tablets. You (I assume, from your comment) and I don't have space problems on our desktop screens, but lots of folks (me included) are more frequently using small, portable devices where every pixel counts.

Sure, but portable devices have totally different UI, or different programs altogether (like Firefox for Android). Why would this impact the main desktop application?

I'm not sure. Fundamentally I agree with you, but I'm a "computer guy" so I always have a lot of screen real-estate.

However, when I'm on my netbook I do appreciate measures to reduce vertical clutter.

"1. What is the panic with space on monitors? Stop making everything at 1080 widescreen TV."

Seriously, we've been doing ourselves a disservice by optimizing monitors for displaying films when 90% of the time we use them to read text.

Didn't know ? They are not film optimized, they are cost optimized.

It turns out if you slide the screen material in the way they do they can slide more screens from the same material.

You can still get other monitors but they are more expensive.

Atleast that is what I heared.

A significant problem with this argument is that the majority of LCD panels are actually used to watch film and video, and the majority of people want cheap monitors.

The death of 4:3 is a natural consequence of these facts.

(Now, you could turn it on its side and optimise for reading portrait text, but given the harsh viewing angles of your typical TN panel this needs either an IPS screen or retooling your factory to build portrait panels - which butts against the 'wants cheap monitors' criteria. Technology progresses but not always in the direction you'd like...)

Manufactures like it because they get to put a bigger number (measured by inches diagonally) on widescreen monitors compared to a 4:3 monitor with the same area (measured by width*height).

But we're doing the disservice to ourselves when we buy it, so your point still stands.

Removal of UI elements is not necessarily to save space. It may be done to reduce visual noise, which in turn may reduce cognitive load.

The issue here for me would be the difference between 'removing' and 'turning off by default'. I don't mind if I can turn the bar back on and put it where I like it as I consider it to be an essential item for me. If it's just a case of turning it on then no biggie.

I registered a lot of complaints over the removal of the status bar text at the bottom of FF4, and the fact that I now have to run an add-on to get that functionality back. It could have EASILY been made an optional element, off by default, but dragged back into place via toolbar customization. As long as you maintain the option to restore classic GUI options then altering the defaults for the 'typical user' doesn't bother me much. But don't remove something entirely and go 'So sorry, too bad.' when it would have been easy to maintain the option.

>removal of the status bar text at the bottom of FF4

Hell yeah, that was stupid. I really hate the new one for many reasons, one of which is that I have to search for it whenever I hover over a link. And whey the hell can't I turn it back on???

As usual, Seamonkey keeps what Firefox changed to stupid.

Exactly. In my opinion, one of the worst things a designer can do is have an attitude of "My change is better, deal with it". It presumes that everyone who uses their product will have a use case similar to them, and the people that don't are screwed. When the change made is actually good, designers will get praised for a "bold new vision" and such. When it goes wrong, it pisses off a lot of people, often to the point where they'll switch to a competitor. Think before you remove that option. "Clean design" isn't worth a damn if your product has become less useful as a result.

But this is the only way to make progress. There will always be users who oppose changes and maintaining old features cost. Microsoft manages this very well (you can basically make Windows 7 look like 95 if you want) but at a great price. They spend many resources maintaining this compatibility and if they didn't they would have been able to make new software much faster.

ignoring people's concerns en masse and introducing something almost nobody cares about or wants is not "the only way to make progress".

The possibility to install an add-on is an option to get the classic GUI back - one that doesn't add to the download size of the program and more importantly, that doesn't create noise in the code base. Maintaining one small feature seems easy but they accumulate.

In my personal opinion offsetting a few KB of extra download size with perhaps years of system resources lost to run an extra add-on makes no sense for something that has been there all along. Not to mention that removal of the 'status bar' required the addition of a new bar to hold Add-Ons, the code to overlay the link preview on the URL bar is far more complex than a single status label, etc. The status text removal made the code more complex, making it a draggable element would have been peanuts extra. Not saying it applies to every case but this one was about as simple as it can be.

I think requiring an addon is optimal, and I'll explain why.

I see "why can't it just be an option?" a lot. Maintaining an option has a cost. Every option introduced in software creates an additional code path that must be maintained, and must be made to play nice with other features and their options. This can add up rather quickly, especially when options have many subtle interactions with other options. It's not about how easy one option is to maintain, it's about how easy all options are to maintain when we decide to add this one.

In the case of the addon, however, the cost of the option is removed from the main code base and the developers who work in it, and shifted to the addon which is (presumably) maintained by developers who care about the feature. In this way, the cost of the feature is distributed over code and development effort that best serves both the users who care about feature in the addon, and the project's user/developer community as a whole. With the only caveat that the addon api must be sufficient, the addon solution is optimal.

There's a mentality that moving a feature to an addon/plugin/whatever makes it a second-class citizen, but I think in most situations, if executed correctly, it's better than trying to maintain it as an integrated feature.

Whitout the address bar I'm afraid we'll see a new peak in phishing attacks.

Is there any good solution to this? One suggestion I like is adding a secure padlock style icon for traffic over HTTPS, but that doesn't cover every case.

They could automatically unhide the URL bar when you start typing into a form.

You have to know more than if the page is HTTPS. I could put a fake facebook page on https://evil.example.com. Normal users could go to it, see the HTTPS icon, see that it looks the same as the facebook login page, and think everything is OK.

First they take away the status bar with the lock icon, now they take away the address bar. How the hell am I going to educate my users to make sure they're visiting the correct secure site and not some attack site?

It's as if the UI designers saw a sketch on a cocktail napkin once that really impressed them and now they expect us to use a cocktail napkin for a browser. As if it's all just about inconsequential web surfing and party drinks.

No, no need to care about security or strong site authentication. UI designers have completely failed us in that respect, too, with click-through certificate warnings. This just formalizes it I guess.

Mozilla Labs obviously needs adult supervision.

Removing the status bar (now requires an add-on) and the menu bar (now requires tweaking about:config) should have been a warning that the people at ML were operating without a clue, but the removal of the address bar goes far beyond just plain ignorance.

The menubar is useless cruft from the 1980s. Can't believe that it's still such a huge part of the OS X user interface.

Bravo to Microsoft Office, Chrome, Firefox, etc. for abandoning the menu bar entirely in their new versions.

I like menubars, and continue to use them every day.

Of the 3 products you mention, Firefox is the only one which I have kept, since they have at least the option of turning on the menu bar.

Until there's an option to turn on the menu bar, Office and Chrome (and everything which mimicks their mistakes) have no place on my machines.

I can kinda understand Office. Tons of commands, you grew up using the menu bar to access them, etc. It's hard to change.

But for browsers? I'm genuinly curious what menu bar commands you're hitting in a browser on a daily basis. There can't be that many. Grouping them all under one menu button to simplify things and free up screen real-estate isn't that big of a deal.

I realize that I'm in the minority as a power user but this would/will seal the deal on me leaving Firefox behind.

Hrm, as a power user doesn't that mean you are more comfortable customizing, like turning the address bar back on?

Also, eliminating the address bar seems to be a trend among the major browsers, if anything I would expect Firefox to be easier to revert the behavior (see how easy it is to switch back from tabs-on-top, for example).

The problem is, Mozilla has moved steadily in the direction of making it harder, if not impossible, to re-enable features they've decided that we don't need.

Can you give a specific example? My example about relocating the tab bar is pretty easy; either View->Toolbars or just right-click on the toolbar.

The bottom status bar comes to mind.

Basically, here's my beef: I own both an iPhone and a computer with a 30" Dell monitor. They are not even remotely alike. Design decisions aimed at making the browser on my PC look and work more like the one on my iPhone are wrongheaded, misguided, and arguably batshit insane, from the perspective of someone who has actually seen, and in fact regularly uses, both platforms.

Vertical space, for one thing, is not at a premium on my PC. It should not be treated as a resource to be conserved at all costs.

I understand the sentiment. But to give you an example of the disparity between someone like you and the general public and how clueless they can be; my wife once saw a hash bang in the url bar and ran to me in a panic. She was scared she had gotten some kind of computer virus.

Yes, one size does not fit all. However, a good design keeps simple things simple and difficult things possible.

To do otherwise would be similar to proclaiming that all movies must be made for children, because children will want to watch them.

I understand this sentiment, too. But after working without the status bar in Chrome (autohide, I guess) for a while, I got used to it and now actually quite like it. And I think hiding it by default, especially for app tabs, is actually quite nice and I like the idea of having more space for the actual content.

As long as there's an easy way to invoke the url bar, I'll be happy.

Never cared for autohide on taskbars etc, I find it distracting to have things moving in and out. However, I do have two high resolution monitors and therefore like having a real menu bar, and real statusbar. Please, browser makers, quit trying to make that difficult.

Although one thing I'd like, which I've seen no one implement yet is to have links urls as tooltips on mouseover. Perhaps below another tooltip if it existed. Shorter distance to move my eyes.

Fortunately, Mozilla Seamonkey tends to leave out such annoying changes.

I still like seamonkey, but the fugly theme from '95 has to go. Feels like Netscape Gold 3.0.

Has anyone even considered the security implications of this? The number 1 way to train users against phishing is to tell them to look at the address bar. Once they know what it means (which in my experience takes a minute to explain), they can easily tell that Bancofamericaa.com is not the bank of america.

I'm not sure how many people here are "domainers" but this could very well end up being a nuclear bomb dropped on the web domain industry.

I honestly can't think of all the implications of how this might change how people interact with the web, but what value is a short memorable domain name (ie: "color.com") if browsers are redesigned to eliminate direct type ins?

Perhaps not as big a deal if the location bar is set to auto-hide, and expand on mouse-over ... but it would really be a tragedy for the industry to disappear.

There are a few domainers on here (Ohashi, Michael Cyger, others?) I'd love to hear some of their comments on how they think the domain industry would change.

The domain name would still influence Google results for the keywords in the domain name :)

It isn't really gonna go away, it is just auto-hide or gonna return in a different form. Have a look at the blog posts there are lot of different ideas there. Auto-hide is what the test-extension now does. I actually like it.

As a "vertical screen space nazi" I surely sympathize with the proposal. I always try to customize my software to use as little toolbar space as possible, maximizing the actual content space.

However, suitable alternatives would have to be found for common usage patterns associated with the location bar, in particular I can think of the following:

1. Properly displaying your location relative to the structure of a website.

2. Verifying the security and validity of an address you are visiting.

3. Typing new addresses and search queries.

4. Copying and sharing the location you are in.

I can think of a few UI alternatives for each of those use cases and the article presents some others, many would require a pretty big change on the way we do things on the Web.

This notion that the URL bar is too complicated is just plain poppycock.

I have a feeling most of the folk pushing for this have a vested interest in search. Maybe they are just overly eager UX people trying desperately to put a fingerprint on something.

This honestly feels like another case of Gnome 3, where a group of inexperienced "UX" people want to make a big splash and change things and take away features as part of their "grand vision". If you disagree, you are wrong. If you have alternate suggestions, you will be ignored.

I think it fundamentally arises from the perception they are developing the interface for some kind of idealized idiot/user that doesnt exist. As is usual, software written for "other people" misses the point and just generally sucks.

See also: Chrome removing the "Go" button.

> trying desperately to put a fingerprint on something

[touches tip of index finger to his nose]

Not to be too cynical about it, but I'd trust the move a lot more if the two companies leading the charge didn't make all their money off of search ads.

Why are we using a GUI anyway? Instead of using unity to add command line functionality, we should just use a terminal. Not only would commands be easy to add, we can leverage existing ones! Speaking of saving screen space, images need to go. I estimate we could save 5 pixels per page with this small change.

The major problem with this is that URLs are currently used for one very important thing, for which there is no widespread alternative: showing the "owning entity" of the site you're visiting. In Internet terms, your domain name is your identity - in a very real way, Facebook's identity is "facebook.com" more than it is "Facebook Inc.".

SSL verifies the hostname of the site you're connecting to, so for SSL to be any use at all, the hostname has to be meaningful and visible.

(I do think you could get away with hiding everything but the domain name and/or hostname by default - the signal-to-noise ratio in the rest of the URL is pretty low anyway).

Hmm I'm undecided on this; I can see both sides of the idea but I do wonder whether it will make sense to a newcomer to the web?

Also remember this idea first appeared on Chrome. Chrome is developed by Google. Google is a business, that realistically, has a vested interest in users not understanding urls - it means less direct site hits and hopefully more traffic via Google.

The current example extension you can use to try it out does autohide of the addressbar with it's buttons.

It is visible when first loaded and when you change tabs, etc.

I think it is pretty easy to find.

I wonder why no one is considering auto-hide mode! That sounds like the most feasible option.

If you looked at the demo, you'd see that's precisely what this experiment is.

> The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space

Not a problem on my old 4:3 laptop screen but I dread the time when my current laptop dies and I have to deal with one of those 16:9 models.

Right now I have 1400x1050 but in the future I would have to deal with 1440x900 or 1600x900. The height difference is more than the height of the location bar.

Or you can get 1680x1050. Same great height, less-filling width.

Yeah, I could, but such a laptop would not fit my favorite backpack ;)

Actually I'd like to own a laptop with a 1400*1200 screen, because I spend a lot of time reading articles and don't care for width.

My work MBP is a little big at 15" and has a 1680x1050 (nonstandard, but the only option for the matte screen). My 12" personal laptop has 1440x900 and that's pretty nice at the size, the pitch is almost the same as the MBP.

A potential side effect of hiding the address bar is that over time web developers may become less motivated to use "clean" human readable URLs (out of sight, out of mind). This could in turn reduce the ability of advanced users to easily understand the link structure of site, and thereby extrapolate the URLs of other pages (something I do regularly).

At first I thought, "that's crazy!". But if you let me unhide it when I press Alt-D, I'd rather save the space most of the time.

I like the way Safari does it. The location bar searches history and book marks and has a instant search result popup. The other one does the same for Google or whatever search engine is selected. Both are useful and I always want to search in ONE and exactly one of these, not both.

This is approximately the dumbest thing I've seen since the "no www" movement.

Does anyone else enjoy the panels side-toggle feature in Opera?

I would be just fine with moving the url UI elements into a panel, so long as I Never have to give up the the side-toggle widget...

I did notice Opera shows on Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch but on clicking on it, it will show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXX

So they leave out the the request parameters and the protocol to dumb it down.

Ubiquity, not "Ubiquitous". It's funny how when you actually know about the subject of the article you realize the author can be misinformed.

I swear, the effectiveness of browser controls has been regressing over the past couple of years.

I know this will be inflammatory, but I'm really reaching the opinion that it's time to take a few of the worst of these "image ueber alles" designers out back and, well, play them that provebial violin.

Must download location bar add-on.

Actually, currently it is an extension to (auto)hide the location bar.

Nothing to worry about

Right now my FF5 main toolbar which is stuck between the actual content and my tabs contains the following elements:

    * Back and forward buttons
    * Reload / stop button
    * Address-bar
    * Search/google box
    * Three buttons provided by various extensions
    * A feedback button, since I'm on a beta.

Let's say they remove the address-bar (and the search/google box). I'll still need a space for the rest of my UI elements. Lets say I dont have those extensions and wasn't running a beta.

In that case, I'd still need a place for those back/forward and stop/reload buttons. Or are they going to take those away as well?

I'm not saying it can't be done, but in my (humble) opinion it would mean access to (other) crucial functionality would be severely displaced. I'm definitely not sure I like the direction which all this extreme UI minimalism is heading.

The space in the middle would be ideal for the tabs.

Have a look at the extenion, it is in the mozilla labs blogpost: http://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/05/20/lesschrome-hd-m...

What is does is autohide the whole bar.

All it leaves is the tab bar with the Firefox-button and some kind of Panorama/Tab Candy pull down thingie.

Sigh. Sounds like the next Firefox release will require yet another half hour's Googling and hacking to figure out how to restore yet another useful feature removed by the Mozilla team.

In other news, the NHTSA, citing road user confusion, has declared that all street signs shall be removed. The only remaining signage will declare the city being entered.

Are we expected to type all URLs into Google search now? This is an awful idea.

A URL bar appears if you open a new tab, hover over a tab, or press Ctrl-L.

Please don't break conventions. They are there for a reason!

> Please do not break conventions. They are there for a reason!

There, I fixed that for you. If you're so upset about breaking conventions, please stop using contractions in your sentences and revert to conventional English. Thank you.

Language changes. Technology changes. This change will bring problems and challenges - as did the contraction ('they're' 'their' and 'there' got a lot worse) but we will solve those problems.

Contractions are conventional both in spoken and written languages and have been for centuries.

The problem here is that the technology has not changed. We are just trying to hide more of the machine from the operator. This will keep happening until the operator is dealing with such a high level abstraction that they no longer can or will understand the machine. I use the term operator rather than user as that implies less of an understanding barrier.

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