Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

It used to be that search and address were two different fields in the browser UI. That helped - if typed in the address bar, you were probably looking for something in an address [so if you typed potato, it could search for a url in your local history with the word potato], and not for something in a web page.

Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!

Unfortunately, Chrome owns the web, and Mozilla copies everything they do. Especially when they are FF's main source of income.

IMO, the old system was more accurate and more private. The search bar is for web searches.

View on HN

Firefox does have a setting to add the search bar back if that’s your jam, you can turn off address bar search suggestions in the settings too.

If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config

Not only that but the shortcuts haven't changed as Ctrl + L puts you in the adress bar and Ctrl+K sets you up for a search with the default engine in the adress bar

Except when you run across sites like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web that intercept Ctrl-K for their own internal search tool. At least that one passes a second Ctrl-K on to the browser for focusing the search bar. I've seen others that don't, although I can't bring one to mind right now.

This is what I do for work. Most of the pages I go to are not on the open internet. And I usually want to go to a wiki page I’ve been to before or to a book mark. If I actually want to search i use the search box. But for me the url bar is for editing and finding urls.

Yep you can. I have mine configured so that it will only search when I use one of the search prefixes. So to search on google I type "g example.com", and this is unambiguous with actually wanting to go to example.com.

> Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search, gives you more places to show ads (as more things qualify as search) and most importantly - legitimizes tracking every page you open - as you did a web search for the URL!

While Google may have the poor intentions you mentioned, don't most user prefer the omnibar vs separate bars? I personally like it quite a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com