But I don't think this really matters to the consumer. Firefox has improved rapidly, mostly as a result of chromes competition. It stagnated for years until chrome came along.
It's like Android vs iPhone. Competition creates better products.
If there wasn't a good competitor to keep innovation going, it would be just like Windows in early 2000s.
Opera has always been a bit fringe like linux (while still being good). IE.. well enough said. Safari was a decent choice on mac for a couple years before Chrome.
Thats where my comparison to windows resides. It was the only decent option. It took OSX a big part of the 00s to reach mainstream dominance over Windows XP.
Also OS X has never reached mainstream dominance over Windows.
demographic = 'the HN crowd'
mainstream_OSes = ['windows', 'mac']
sorted = sort_by_popularity_within_demographic(mainstream_OSes, demographic)
dominant = sorted[0]
IE's rendering engine and JS/CSS, to be more precise. (Look at the IE6 in Longhorn pre-releases and IE6 in XP SP2)
I feel this is much better than the Safari/Firefox way of handling things, where you essentially switch between two modes (usually by tabing) of either trying to find something or trying to hit a direct URL. Users don't want to operate in modes, they just want to find things.
That's the official purpose of having two bars anyway, but I can't find the article where I remember this being stated.
It's all personal preference, and there's no universally correct answer.
For as long as I can remember, the first thing I've done when installing a new browser is remove the search bar and all of the toolbar buttons. Searching from the address bar is no more or less convenient than from the dedicated search field, and all of the other actions can be done faster using keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures or, in my case, extra mouse buttons.
What's the appeal of having a separate search bar taking up space?
"g whatever" - Google "whatever"
"w whatever" - Wikipedia search for "whatever"
"a whatever" - Amazon search for "whatever"
...
New shortcuts can be added and the existing ones can be changed. For example, when I type "g whatever", it searches Duck Duck Go.
In Firefox it has to be manually configured for each site, with a user-specified prefix. When the fuck is a normal user going to do that?
Not having every url I type in sent to Google is the main appeal.
And you can turn it off in any case.
What fraction of them do you think would be OK with this if it were pointed out to them? My anecdotal sample suggests about 50% or so.
Violating the privacy of 50% of their users in a way they do not desire by default is not something Mozilla is likely to do. Google of course considers this perfectly ok, as expected. They don't believe in this antiquated "privacy" thing to start with.
As far as "turn it off", you can also switch to using a single combined search bar in Firefox if you want to mess with the settings. This discussion is about defaults.
But the point remains: they send what you type in the url bar to your default search engine. This is not behavior many users are OK with once they realize it's happening.
I can right-click a search field, bookmark it with a simple title e.g. wiki, g, i, imdb and then search from the address bar by typing the keyword and then the query.
I like this method because it is reliable and doesn't change the look of the address bar. I use Chrome about 25% of the time on Windows and the thing with searching different sites from a blank tab is that it is unreliable for me.
With how the Omnibar works, I no longer need to type in a full URL. It either searched for the site I wanted via Google, via my favourites or via my history and it would get it right almost 100% of the time.
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/btl/statcounter-chrome-overtakes-fir...
Or had Chrome set up as their default browser without their consent when they installed Skype and don't know how to change to a different browser. Hard to tell, obviously.
I'd love to see a credible estimate of how much of Chrome's install base is due to the "install it and make it default" bundling deals.