Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.
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 is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.
I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me
Hmmm. It took me a while to figure out that you weren't referring to sites for angling enthusiasts.
Allowing the URL bar to also act as search or vice versa, the simple act of trying to do the one thing now does something else that you might or might not have intended or been aware of being possible is not the same as a single purpose choke. When that possible thing is sending your data to a 3rd party, then that is just bad.
Edit: finished an incomplete thought
Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.
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.
I wouldn't call it bad behaviour. Why are the users behaving bad and not the interfaces? Computers are meant to serve users.
The realized model of having two separate boxes could only ever be "wrong" in a moral or aesthetic sense. This is not the case for mental models, which are incorrect when they do not correspond to reality.
The vast bulk of users would respond either by changing nothing about their behavior because all this stuff is inside-baseball to them, or changing their behavior by resetting their browser's search bar to some other target (for example, I can go into Chrome right now and remove Google from the list of search engines).
At this point, one really has to reach to conclude that awesomebars are bad for end-users without an ideology that doesn't reflect the average user very well at all.
All models are wrong, some are useful. We are debating how useful this model is.
The end game system for google is one where you just talk to it like a person and it does what you want without having to have any kind of training on the system.
"What things really are" is microscopic invisible electrical patterns thrumming through specially-shaped chemically-doped sand to shove some crystals back and forth to change some reflected and emitted light frequencies that hit a human eye to be interpreted by a human brain.
Literally everything about UX is obscuring what things really are, because what things really are is "utterly incompatible with human cognition." There's an entire field of disciplined study to build a compatibility layer regular people can use; without it, all these fancy computers are just dumb matter in weird shapes.
The fact that people who work in tech have to jump from precise terminology like "open your browser, and navigate to $URL" to stuff like "click the E and then find the bar at the top where you search thing and type..." is 100% our failing. We are the ones responsible for creating a population of people who are tech "illiterate" because we've spend all our time and effort keeping the words from users.
Remember: XEROX PARC's GUI breakthrough was "What if we make working on a computer feel like pushing stuff around on an office desk." "Educating the user" required walking three-quarters of the way to what they were already familiar with.
Instead of trying to teach users how a search bar is different from a URL bar, there's a lot of meat on the bones of the idea of just making them the same thing. They look like the same thing. They act like the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing?
I would absolutely kill for a shortcut that when held creates an overlay that puts labels on all the UI elements so I can say, "hold Ctrl+H and look for navigation bar."
Moreover, most of the time users are just watching video, so why not to launch a video stream right after powering of the device? Why we need to confuse user with these buttons and Internet at all?
Moreover, user are watching video to satisfy their hunger for new, to feel good. Why not just to produce a chemical which make the same when consumed? Or just plant electrodes into brain, which is much safer. Then, without burden of these users, we will able to use a browser with separate URL and search bars, which is good for work performance.
I can tell you're being facetious, but you actually just described "television," and you should see the numbers on how many people buy cable instead of cutting the cord and subscribing to a handful of streaming services for half the price specifically because (and they do surveys on this stuff) "I just want it to work; I don't want to search for something to watch, I want to turn it on, it's already playing something, and I just put it in the background."
> we will able to use a browser with separate URL and search bars, which is good for work performance
Maybe I just don't do the kind of work where it's mattered, but the fact that my URL bar also accepts keywords and auto-directs them to a search engine has never impacted my work performance (perhaps because I use bookmarks for anything I need to get to frequently, bypassing the URL bar entirely).
My mom has 64" 4k TV with excellent image quality, but very often (right now, for example) she watches YouTube on her old CoreDuo PC with 24" screen, in small window. I don't know why.
My search bar shows me my past searches, instead of random suggestions, while my URL bar shows my past URL's, which saves tons of time for me when I need to find a past site or a past search. Also, I can quickly select another specialized search engine for a search.
I general, general people needs something simple, while a professional needs something powerful.
Chrome's unified bar currently supports that. Type a fragment of a site name and hit tab... If the site published a standard search mapping in its metadata, the bar changes modes to direct a search query to the specified website. Super useful for GitHub.
I am literally looking at a bar labeled "Search" at the top of my browser window right now.
"As we approach the limit of efficiency, movement because becomes so little that it is practically inert, nothing has to move because it's already there, where it is supposed to be" - me
Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine. Most of what we do is in pursuit of allowing the user to do more with less of their capacity.
The URL itself is a naming abstraction to let users identify things. And it's not even a great one; it has some sharp edges from the end-user's point of view (why does the end user care about protocol? They just want the thing. Why do they care about domain? They just want the thing. Why is the path nine slashes long? The thing they saw yesterday was just "history of mesopotamia;" if they type that in, they should just get the thing). Allowing the bar to accept and intelligently identify multiple different ways to identify things is an increase in capability, not a decrease.
However, what I take issue is with "intelligently identify multiple ways to identify "the thing"" sure, in you're example if someone wants to get to the top search result for "the history of mesopotamia" it might be doing alright...but, who is the one who decided what that search result is, if I type in "history of mesopotamia" and I get shunted directly to the wikipedia entry, maybe that's all ever get, I won't see the thing I really might have wanted which was a specific book about stone tablets of mesopotamia.
The point is, offloading our intelligence to "the machine" only makes as smart or as agenda driven as the machine and its maker, this overall must have some limiting effect. even if doing more with less capacity is good, if the capacity itself is limited to the machine, then it's like saying, I can eat more pie, but the pie is also shrinking.
> Because automating tedium is the purpose of the machine.
Getting people to think of knowing where they are and what they're doing as "tedium" is exactly what The Man wants. Congratulations on your succesful assimilation.
Maybe instead of "which box should they type into" we should be asking why the url interface is a simple text box to begin with.
Looking at those old screenshots shows me how much the current autocomplete has regressed. The suggestions used to be so much better since it was a literal text search across titles and URLs. I remember you could configure how many results were displayed, I always set it to the max.
The 2-line rich display was awesome for scanning URLs too. The "URL after the title" we have now makes it impossible to do that.
Edit: Fixed most of these annoyances with this: https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...
For me, zero results.
Not me! Confusing the users was deliberate.