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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

The industry as a whole will need to return to simpler UIs and that are usable, functional and practical. We'll need to leave this dark period behind us, but hopefully we can learn from these mistakes to ensure future applications do not fall victim to the problems we are witnessing today.

Well, you have to qualify why Chrome's UI sucks, otherwise it's just an opinion. As far as I am concerned, it is useful plenty.

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Indeed. Years ago, they took a bold choice to use one input box for both searching and url's and now it's one major reason why I use Chrome over Firefox and Safari.

Firefox's bar works exactly the same as Chrome's now. And even long before FF started letting you search from the address bar without search keywords, you could use search keywords.

I prefer the in-bar history searching in FF too.

Firefox's bar works exactly the same as Chrome's now.

Is it exactly the same? In Firefox, AFAIK you don't get every URL you type sent off to Google for logging as part of the instant search system; that only happens with things you type in the separate search box. In Chrome, I'm not sure whether it's the default for a new installation at the moment, but that capability is definitely there for anything you type in the (only) box.

It's the same almost all of the time, but some searches with colons will be run through the URL path instead because it thinks you meant http://

I meant exactly the same as far as an average user is concerned - you never have to use the search box (I remove it), you can just put search terms in the main box and it'll use the configured provider.

I will admit FF is a little worse at confusing search terms for a URL on occasion, but that's a minor annoyance at best.

It wasn't the annoyance I was commenting on, but rather the privacy implications of combining the two bars when what you would type in one of them is typically sent off to some search engine somewhere in real time.

Fun fact: In 1999, Mozilla (around its M11 release) introduced a "Search" button to the location field [0] which meant a unified input box. Firefox and its two-field setup is, absurdly enough, a later move. I can't point out when it happened, or if it was already there in the earliest days.. The single box is still there in Seamonkey, though, iirc.

[0] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html

Safari in 10.8 works in a similar way as Chrome does with the address bar. Indeed it seems to be faster too, I'm toying with switching from Chrome. We shall see.

Indeed, it's hard to knock Chrome's UI, it barely has one.

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