I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation.

That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an address is, calling it a URL adds an extra layer to learn (even if it is just terminology). URLs would also be easier to understand if they were more consistent from the end user's perspective, much like someone's mailing address, rather than an engineer's perspective.

I would also argue that the omnibar is designed from the engineer's perspective rather than the end user's perspective. The engineer said something to the effect of, "we can differentiate an address from a search query based upon the format of the input". It sounds good on paper. It sounds like it makes things easier for the user. Yet all that it really accomplishes is creating confusion for the end user since it fails to differentiate two concepts.

I designed[1] the Chrome Omnibox, and appreciate a lot of the conjecture in this thread and other places - I wish I was as devious as many people assume we were.

The short version is that while many users can differentiate, it's more a problem of WHEN they differentiate - Chrome's entire design philosophy was around speed, and the omnibox was designed so that we had a simple destination that a user could focus on when they had decided to go somewhere else, but before they had decided WHERE they wanted to go to or HOW they were going to get there, and then make it so they wouldn't have to think about the HOW. If their search term autocompleted to a URL so they don't have to go through search, that was a win. This same philosophy was what drove putting the most visited pages on the New Tab Page (which was a blank page in most browsers at the time).

Some users plan out their actions before they take them, but I wanted to make everything as streamlined as possible so you could interact with Chrome as you thought about what you wanted, and not making you wait until after.

[1] I was the designer and occasional engineer, but the entire team takes the credit - everyone was behind the idea from before we even started work on Chrome, and many smart people deserve more credit than I do for how good it ended up being.

On the other hand, I despise this exact change in Firefox. When I want to search, I use the search bar. When I want to enter an address, I use the address bar. I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and it is annoying to no end if the browser confuses one for the other. For example, by auto-completing a search term to a URL instead (see: computers don't know what users want). That's why I personally prefer the ability to make that choice explicitly.

I get it, I'm not the kind of user this article is about. And maybe I'm just insufficiently exposed to the other paradigm to have become "fluent" in it. But I just wanted to point out that there definitely are users whose mental model differentiates search terms and URLs.

>Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL.

I don't think good software always aims for the lowest common denominator. It's not an unequivocal good that users' lack of education is catered to. Infantilizing users makes them more dependent on services, and less able to navigate the internet.

>Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook".

one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google", because people don't understand that the chrome omnibox performs a google search, and they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them.

if you're trying to draw any conclusions about user preferences from user behaviour, you have to accept that you're going to be wrong about a significant portion of your users. one workflow might be "better" for some portion of your users, but it won't mesh with the mental model of some other portion of your users. different groups will form different expectations and habits, and a single UI will not completely satisfy the expectations of every group.

> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com"

Tech-savvy people will type f, see that their browser completes "acebook.com", and press enter. That's a form of search, it's just more directly provided by the browser and unambiguously serving the user.

(Ideally, tech-savvy people will type f and see no signs of facebook whatsoever, but that's an orthogonal issue.)

I don't think this is correct at all. Google's decision was intentional to capture every request, even ones who are simply searching for a known domain. Users adapted to google's pattern and learned things the wrong way.

This is only one example of the damage caused by very-low-friction, addictive interfaces. Users have increasingly lost the capability to navigate hierarchical interfaces and increasingly use web search instead of looking around for the right button

> Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL

Why don't they? This is a somewhat serious question.

Part of it, in my opinion, is we are moving too fast, and giving up on users to quickly. With enough education, people will understand. But enough education = at least a generation or two, introducing it in schools at a young age, etc. But we just threw our hands up and said "oh well, they don't get it, lets make it simple".

URL = phone number. Search box = Phone book. They are two very different things, and having them both in the same box I feel confuses some people even more.

I think a good analogy is an automatic vs manual car. Most people prefer to have one pedal for the accelerator. But you still have many car enthusiasts (web enthusiasts) that know how cars (the web) work and want to control the mechanics behind the scenes. I wish it was still an option provided to users.

Google has a financial incentive for the Omnibar though. After searching for "facebook" users would click the first link, which might also happen to be an ad for Facebook. Effectively, turning a profit from the laziness of people not typing .com.

Chrome's omnibar was designed to allow Google to MITM every web request, not to simplify things for the user.

Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.

> But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.

I think you're making the mistake of thinking of "users" as a monolithic, lowest common denominator group. There are users who think like you describe, and there are users who do not. Also catering to people's existing (perhaps oversimple) mental models ensures those models never change.

One of the PR issues with Firefox is that it has/had many features that suited the latter group, but decided to drop them to ape Chrome.

>Think like a user, not an engineer.

So your technology, too, can become a melange of idiotic decisions where you leak things into a search engine!

While you're at it, only feed your kids ice cream and pizza because that's what they want to eat. Think like a kid, not an adult.

Even as a technical user, I Google "natwest" instead of typing in "natwest.com". Much safer than typing "natwest.co" and getting caught by phishing sites.

"It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design."

Not considering Mozilla's "business model" is forwarding searches by default to Yahoo/Google for a price. Would be surprising if the search engine website contracting with Mozilla did not have an expectation that the Firefox UI would be conducive to submitting as many default "searches" as possible, whether intentionally or not. (User could type an address in the search bar and it would be forwarded to Google. She now has a Google cookie.) Would also be surprising if there was not a similar expectation that the Firefox settings UI make it relatively unlikely that users would change the search engine defaults.

Chrome's design is good for Google. More so than Firefox's design is good for [search engine partner]. For users who do not want to be accidentally sending queries to Google, the "Omnibox" design sucks. It also is incorrect in that it defeats the notion of what is and what is not a valid domain name or a valid URL. It does not educate users about the www, it allows them to stay ignorant. Would not be surprising if that is how Google views its users and prefers that they remain unaware of what is happening.

For example, look at how Google descibes the NID cookie. They are not lying but they are repeatedly suggesting that its most signifcant purpose is a user's configuration preferences. However its primary purpose is for advertising. A fully informed user with choice over consent is apparently not what Google wants.

https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US

The primary purpose of the "omnibox " is not to benefit the user (although it may do so for some users), it is to benefit Google's "business model" of collecting data about users and selling online ad services.

Even engineers do this. A couple of years ago I watched a colleague - a very talented software engineer - do a Google search.

He typed "google" into the search/URL bar and hit Enter.

This took him to a search results page, with Google as the first entry.

He clicked on Google.

This took him to the Google home page.

He entered his search query into the search box on the Google home page, and hit Enter.

Now he had the search results he wanted!

This is is an unpopular opinion on a place like Hacker News, but it is correct.

Users want access to the information they are looking for as quickly and frictionlessly as possible—the omni bar does just that.

Firefox has has an "omni" bar for a long time. Firefox could search your bookmarks and history as you type in an URL (in addition to keywords that could trigger searches). It was one of the key reasons (in addition to tabs) that I switched to Firefox back in the day. (Or am I misremembering this?)

Google wanted all user input leaking to them. They got it. When I first saw this feature it felt like a natural progression...a real innovative feature. I didn't need it though. In the end, browsers probably should not have knowledge of search engines, for various reasons.

> Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.

I've actually switched to searching even for URLs I know, if they don't autocomplete from history. My typing accuracy isn't 100%, and I'm confident the top Google result will be the correct domain even if I make a typo (rather than some phishing clone squatting on an adjacent name).

Firefox actually had both, you could always search with the "main" bar. That's why having two has been so infuriating over the years, if I ever had to use Firefox, I've removed the search bar immediately.

However, one thing that Firefox failed to fix over dozens of versions have been one-word-searches, which Chrome handled correctly while Firefox tried to resolve that one word as a domain and didn't even fall back to search if that failed. That single thing has brought me back to Chrome within minutes every time I've wanted to try Firefox again.

On the other hand, I can't think of any advantage myself to having these things be discrete boxes, and I know what a search term and a URL is (as I'm sure most users do, give them some credit here). Corner cases rarely happen and if I think something might look like a url but is a search term, you can prepend the term with whitespace. Ultimately having them not be discrete boxes means I can see more of the url before it folds, which I prefer.

Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).

> It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design

You can still enable the separate search bar in the settings if you want.

I find it interesting that the discussion about this feature is only about design/interaction principles.

I mean, maybe this is right and a merged search/URL bar is the best call from a design standpoint. I don't mind having one.

But do you really think that's why Google implemented a feature in Chrome that sends more people to Google?

It was, I'm sure, a revenue decision first and foremost, and Google is probably delighted when people identify it as something else.

The same logic applies just as well for any browser vendor who makes money off of search partners.

> Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com"

browsers used to do these these things (trying to add 'www.' or '.com' etc. if the domain doesn't resolve) automatically in the location bar (which wasn't the search bar, so there was no ambiguity):

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar#...

> IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook"

I wonder if this holds true for both PC and Mobile, because it is easier to perform a search and trust the search engine to deliver the link, rather than finish typing ".com".

Firefox did away with the search bar a long time ago. For a while, it was possible to bring it back through about:config, but I don't think it's possible to make the url bar a clean url bar anymore (this is an invitation for corrections). It's annoying because I navigate to pages via URLs, and all I don't want to send those to a search engine for "suggestions" (though, a locally-indexed history is nice). All too often, I'll type in a url and it will send that to a search engine, and then the page I wanted to go to is buried under ads. Useless. Especially now that Firefox is moving to paid ads in the "url" bar... blech.