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Comment by conductor | Hacker News Reader

> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing

As a user, I want separate edit bars for separate functions. I don't want Google know everything I type (or mistype) in the address bar. When I type foobar in the address bar please give me anything that returned the web server at foobar or give me an error if there is no foobar or the foobar have no web server. If I want to search foobar then I will type it in the search bar by myself.

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I encourage Chrome users to go check the search history attached to their Google account. It exposes a lot of data that you didn't realize you were sending to Google (including letter-by-letter entry of search terms/urls) and may give a newfound respect for Firefox's separation, whether you personally care enough to make the switch or not.

I only use Chromium because it's supposed to not have the phone-home "features" that are in Chrome.

...or at least it's that they claim.

EDIT: "they" being Google. http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-...

Who's "they"?

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-...

Note that even Firefor has at least one kind of phone home "feature" enabled by default - malware protection. It keeps asking Google if the sites you are visiting are OK, thus sending the list of visited sites to Google.

I know that they are supposed not to misuse this information, but I would feel much better if they didn't receive it at all.

The SafeBrowsing implementation does not send every URL you visit to Google. There's a local database of bad URLs, but stored in a way that can have false positives, to improve efficiency. Only if you get a match with the local database does it contact Google to see if it is a false positive or not.

And, according to your edit, you missed my point. That blog post explicitly states that Chromium has many of the same "phone-home features" of Chrome. That includes the specific one discussed in this thread, "search suggest".

The difference between Chromium and Chrome is mainly that Chromium doesn't include the proprietary featuresets included in Chrome, like the Pepper Flash implementation. Chromium is not a more private build, it's just a more open build. They still send all your data to Google by default, just like Chrome.

To my knowledge search history is opt-in (as opposed to opt-out).

Reconfirmed this for my Google accounts and in fact it is not storing search history. Ofcourse Google may be tracking it on their end, but I assume very few services don't track, so that's a non-issue (at least for me).

For anyone who wants to check, the url is:

https://history.google.com/history/

Search history as presented to you may be opt-in, but what Google actually does with your data is unknowable.

Google provides a unified privacy policy for all products that describe how the collected data is used.

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse

If you don't send them the data in the first place, it doesn't matter what their privacy policy says -- either today or in the future -- about how they will use it.

This was a big deal on /. when Chrome launched. As several /.ers pointed out, there is a setting for that in Chrome, so it isn't a good reason to prefer one browser over another. http://www.thechromesource.com/how-to-turn-off-search-sugges...

If you find letter by letter search useful but only want to use it would you are searching, not while using the address bar. Then it can be a good reason.

I agree, though Firefox's awesomebar (if it's still called that) already integrates search, and seems to autocomplete to things I've never visited with suggested search queries. This might be related to my use of the DuckDuckGo extension though.

I also use ctrl-L and ctrl-K for navigating and searching, respectively, and I've found the way Chrome handles ctrl-K by focusing on the navigation bar and filling it with a '?' lacking. For instance, it clears my last query, where I often refine queries after quickly inspecting the results I got first time around. The requirement of having a '?' in front of search queries is also annoying, since it hinders a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Most notably, if I change my mind, Ctrl-A doesn't allow me to restart typing a query without manually inserting the '?' again.

I had to separate that and disable all the searching on the address bar. I got sick of it not quite understanding what I wanted.

There's a setting to disable "recommended" autocomplete (and only autocomplete from local history). Once at the Google search page, there's a separate setting to [en/dis]able autocomplete, and it may or may not actually work.

I've taken to changing my Chrome search engine to "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&complete=0", which does disable the autocomplete behavior, but also appears to give a slightly older version of the search page.

Obviously the proper next step would be to switch to DuckDuckGo.

I don't understand the issue. alt+d for address bar ctrl+k for search bar.

What's so complicated?

And I assume you also don't understand why anyone might prefer to use an IDE instead of vim/emacs...

Even when using an IDE I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts - they are part of the tools available to make my workflow quicker.

ctrl+l is also address bar.

Also F6 (at least on some operating systems).

Less elements to worry about. I switched from Firefox to Chrome few years ago and now find separate bar being unintuitive. If I stayed on Firefox, I would say that having united bar is intrusive to privacy and illogical.

My final point, letting users decide would be the best option here, and Firefox did exactly this! I managed to reconfigure it into a single address-bar working as search bar too, except search engine auto-completion.

Unfortunately you are not the average user, if you want Firefox to succeed it needs to do what is common, both IE, and Chrome the two most popular browsers have a single address/search bar.

In regards to the whole tinfoil hat comments about Google knowing everything you type, well I hate to burst your bubble but they probably already know everything about you, including but not limited too your inability to spell duck right.

I think firefox has already succeeded

Succeeded - but is it still succeeding today?

I can't remember the last time I used Firefox intentionally. Chrome replaced it long ago.

As a web dev, I find myself more annoyed at the anomalies of Gecko everyday. I fix more Gecko related bugs than IE11 bugs, and that just feels wrong.

I don't expect this to be a popular opinion, but I have to say based on recent experience that if it wasn't for Chrome, I'd be using IE11 on a PC and Safari on a Mac. Firefox just feels too kludgy every time I use it.

Really? From my experience Chrome has a lot of anomalies/regressions since version 32. And Android 2.3 browser (WebView also in 4x) reminds me of the IE 6.

Gecko and Trident are very good in comparison. Google needs a better QA process, especially after forking Webkit.

The only thing that bothers me with Firefox beside some UI is the single process model.

Can you please point me to some of the Gecko bugs you've been running into?

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