Hacker News Reader

Comment by dn3500 | Hacker News Reader

http://ai is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want.

It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gave up his US citizenship. He talked the Anguilla government into letting him set up its internet infrastructure for them.

View on HN

> Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want.

I genuinely want to know what you think is the percentage of FF users who type "ai" who intend to go to http://ai and not search for "ai" is. Even better if you can estimate that for all possible single words that are also TLDs. And then tell me why users who might actually want the domains can't just disable search from the address bar which is a feature FF has which is exactly tailored for this use case. And then also tell me what is wrong with having to explicitly specify "http://<whatever TLD>" which works even when the search-from-address feature is enabled.

The bigger question is what percentage of users would like a separate search / location field. Merging them created this problem but now that screens are bigger I think we can afford another textbox.

Good thing that's an option that is trivial to enable under Preferences -> Search -> Search Bar. I suspect most users who are technical enough to appreciate the significance of going to http://ai are able to figure that one out easily enough.

Being technical enough, I’d type http://ai and wouldn’t for a second have thought that some time in the past, someone working on Firefox thought “hey, we could offer a second text box for searching” even though the idea Makes Sense because so much that Makes Sense has been argued against by the leaders of various projects and I’m callused against trying to understand the motivation behind changes to things that already worked before they were removed or hidden…

trivial to enable but badly maintained. When I enabled that originally it broke the search bar on the default new tab page.

The default behavior is also nonsensical if you want to access anything on the local network by name.

I have been using the separate search bar for, idk, 10(?) years and I have never encountered a single bug with it (including the one you describe). Maybe you should give it another chance and chalk that up to an issue with the initial rollout, which is a standard thing to happen on virtually every software release.

> The default behavior is also nonsensical if you want to access anything on the local network by name.

Ok, and what percent of users do you think that affects? And what percent of those aren't technically savvy enough to enable the separate search bar? And what percent of those who aren't under a company managed policy that enables the separate search bar automatically? Let's make some reasonable estimates about those numbers and then reevaluate how "nonsensical" this core feature of Firefox is.

> Ok, and what percent of users do you think that affects?

And that right here is the same argument you can make for showing the hand full of remaining Firefox users a "this site requires a modern browser, download chrome here" message. After all the amount of users affected by that is a fucking rounding error.

That is not remotely the same argument. Designing efficient UX != ensuring open standards on the Web

My cynical take is that the majority of people don't change default settings. So it is only a matter of time before the setting gets obsoleted because no one uses it.

And yes, I do have the two bars separated.

The address bar is for finding things locally that I know I have like bookmarks. The search bar is for finding things on the internet. It really bugs me that those two very different concepts get merged and conflated in modern browsers.

> I think we can afford another textbox.

I say kill the concept of integrated search altogether. Search is a web page and should never be part of a web browser. Ever. It allows web browsers to sell that search bar default setting to the highest bidder. Or if your google, drive traffic to your advertising search engine using technologies that directly benefit its bottom line and nothing else.

Besides, searching sucks. Its all been SEO'd to death meaning finding information posted by real humans who are passionate about a subject are drowned in sea of mediocre (at best) blogspam. Of course this blogspam is funded by google adverts which only perpetuates this feedback loop of madness.

>It allows web browsers to sell that search bar default to the highest bidder.

Does Mozilla do that?

I assume yes since the default search is Yahoo when they could/should partner with DDG.

It's quietly one of favorite things on the internet that I can reach a hacker webpage by typing in "ai/security". That's, like, better than "ai.security" or similar because it completely does away with normal TLD conventions ("civil disobedience"!). It also happens to flip the namespacing around in a way that's kinda more human ("security in the context of AI"), which is meta in its own way given the context is about humans vs machines.

Very cyberpunk.

(And I checked; ai.security is parked. Very amusing.)

> A former U.S. citizen, he gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 in protest of U.S. laws on the export of cryptography.

Just to get this right. Makes him sound much more reasonable than protesting taxes.

You still can type "ai." (including the dot, excluding the quotation) in your browser. Works in firefox (tested in 104), however does not work in Chrome (tested in Chromium 105).

"http://ai." works in Chrome

Doesn't work on Chrome on Android

working here. latest chrome, android 12

i wish ppl would stop calling anything "latest"

it has a specific version. plz use it.

okay

well obviously, he meant without the protocol at the beginning

scheme*

Does not work in Edge.

Does anything?

Telemetry does.

pithily said!

You need a slash for it to work in Chrome: "ai./" and "ai/" both work in Chrome (obviously without quotes.)

I need a slash in firefox too, dot also just searches

Apparently my router's built-in DNS server doesn't like the domain name `ai.` or `ai`. Switching to Google's fixes the issue for me.

I bet he has a great big house, but guess what he doesn't have? Anything to do! Boring! That's what I'm paying the extra 1.5k a month for! Fun shit!

California forever and goodbye!!!

Anguilla is a tourist destination, there is obviously stuff people want to do...

Tourist destinations get old real quick though.

New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Paris, and many others are all tourist destinations and people seem to love to live there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com