Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both.

If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally).

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.

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.

So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.

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.

The whole point of intuitive design is to realize that you shouldn't make your users "think", insofar as making effortful cognition (i.e., Kahneman's "Type 2" thinking).

Good design should leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models, to create affordances that guide users to the desired interaction and behavior.

If a design promotes incoherent behavior, it's not the user that's wrong; getting users to change intuitive behavior requires training and cognitive effort.

Sadly, why vim and emacs are still difficult for newbies to pick up. Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.

Defined like this, this makes "intuitive design" a very destructive trend.

There's only so far you can go trying to "leverage built-in assumptions of how the world, per users' intuitive mental models". Computing world is not like everyday experience in many important ways, and trying to pretend it is only burdens the user with inconsistent mental models that don't allow them to navigate and grow their intuition.

The way I see it, it is the failure of UX design that it tries to hide the nature of computers - instead of making it apparent, so that the users can learn and internalize the important axioms of this different world. Intuition needs to be calibrated to the underlying reality for it to be useful.

> Yes, the learning curve is (arguably) minimal; that's not the point. It's that there is a learning curve at all.

There's few things in the world that have no learning curve. Almost everything is learned. Almost everything that's important in life is learned either through direct training, or picked up over time from exposure. This is where every UX designer inventing their own "simplifying" abstractions is hurting users: nobody is training them, but software is so inconsistent nowadays that they don't get to learn from exposure either.

They don't want the abstraction punctured to see the inner workings...

Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction, where they want to pull the door, when the door only works by pushing (yet the door handle basically beckons to be pulled)...

Whether it's a good thing or not is besides the point. It's how people work, if you want to reach them at scale.

> Anything less than that creates a Norman Door conflict, whereby their inner mental models conflict with the intended interaction (...)

Here I disagree, because the underlying assumption is that those "intuitive" interfaces are exploiting an existing mental model of the users, like door handles in the physical world. This is not true, because computing is new, and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists. Part of the job of UI is to enable the users to build correct mental models in the first place - and to the extent they introduce bad abstractions, they fail at this job, leaving users with bad mental models that don't correspond to reality, and don't let them make sensible predictions.

Note: I don't disagree with Norman. I disagree with how his work is used to justify current UX design trends.

There was a subtle joke about this in Star Trek: The Next Generation: Wesley Crusher, on a visit to a starbase to take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam, stood in front of a door confused until Picard used the handle to open it for him. Wesley had grown up on starships where the doors opened automatically as you approach, and had never seen a door handle before.

According to Wesley's actor, this wasn't in the script and they came up with it right before doing the scene (and it made it into the episode).

Strong disagree. Looking at the URL bar in Firefox vs Chrome is a great example of how Chrome nailed an "obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists".

We can look at things like the design of door handles, and clearly see how the shape of the human hand influences the design. If we had tentacles, door handles probably would look more different.

The same thing applies to human minds (as opposed to hypothetical alien minds, or AIs). Humans all have a hippocampus, a prefrontal cortex, and other universal biological factors in cognition which influences HOW thoughts are formed.

That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say "WELL JELLYFISH IS AN ANIMAL WITH DNA TOO SO OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE CAN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JELLYFISH AND DOGS/CATS". Uhhh, no, that's a massive jump to an extreme conclusion. There's a BIG difference between someone typing "facebook" into a URL bar, and them putting their trash in their mailbox.

I'm not saying you should put literally everything including "change settings" or "access your bookmarks" in the omnibar, merely that combining the URL bar and the Search bar was clearly a common sense UI idea, and even Firefox bowed in after a while.

Your job as a developer isn't to force the user to learn more things. Your job as a developer is not to be arrogant and insist that the user must understand some technical model they don't care about. If they want to go to BankOfAmerica.com, and they typed in "BOA", your job is to make it easier for them to do their banking, even if they're massive idiots when it comes to tech. Human brains have a universal structure, which merely means you need to target the lowest common denominator when it comes to design.

As an aside, this is why Apple products historically are known for being very easy to use by the elderly. I certainly am grateful for the fact that my grandparents were able to learn to use Facetime and looked forward to using that software before they passed away. I'm not sure if Apple's ease-of-use is still true, for what it's worth- they've added a lot of complexity in recent years.

---

Addendum:

This is HN, full of very smart tech people who also happen to be terrible at empathy, so I'll give the usual spiel on empathy (which is usually disregarded by people with overly large egos): The person who typed "BOA" into the URL bar might be a tech idiot, but that tech idiot may just be a really good neurosurgeon, and that person may just prefer to spend their brain cells dealing with their own specialty. Humans are good at specialization, and I'd rather my brain surgeon not know or care or spend too much of their energy in understanding DNS, or the difference in how Chrome distinguishes URLs from search queries. For that matter, I'd rather not have to teach my grandparents the difference between a URL and a search query, either.

If you (the reader) is anything like the average tech guy, there's a good chance you're physically unhealthy in multiple ways, and in an alternate universe there's an internet forum of doctors lacking empathy who are shaking their heads and saying "why can't our patients simply spent a bit of their brain cells and time on eating correct amounts of the precise macronutrients, identifying each of the 13 major muscle groups and stretch and exercise them every day, actually doing the correct amount of cardio where they track if they hit 160bpm and sustain that amount (under age 45), sleep at the precise time each day for optional functioning of the central nervous system, etc". There's probably a mechanic forum that's complaining about tech guys who own cars and saying "why can't they just do a blackstone oil test to know what's the optimal amount of mileage for their car to do an oil change, why don't they routinely fill up their tires to the labeled air pressure to maximise fuel economy, etc". None of what these doctors or mechanics are suggesting something /unreasonable/ per se... but most of that stuff just aren't priorities for an average person to learn and deal with. In conclusion, you can be extremely smart in the tech industry (or any other field) and still be an absolute idiot in so many ways, and that's okay- but you need to keep in mind that the same thing applies to your users for their fields of non-specialty.

In summary: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Full disclosure, I started writing this after I took my sleeping pills for the night, so ignore any grammatical issues or bad structure

The only reason the recycling examples seem absurd is because 1) it simply isn't that difficult to remember "trash goes in a black in and recycling goes in a blue bin and mail goes in... a different blue bin ;P" and 2) it is obvious how hard it is to separate the two results in the general case and the ramifications seem silly to tolerate given the low effort that the user has to take on to prevent it.

The exact same thing is true of the omnibar: there are a bunch of heuristics that often work well enough and people who are particularly lazy and don't want to learn the difference between the various bins don't have to because we figure it out for them... most of the time. I personally think that people shouldn't be so lazy, but it seems like the entire goal of "UX design" is to empower lazy people to "not have to think" (which is very different from "intuitive": after all, "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned").

The reason then I think it is "destructive" goes further, though, than "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy": it is because, as someone else pointed out, there is a cost to leaking a user's intent to the search engine when they wanted to type in an address (in the same way that mailing someone's trash out randomly might be a privacy violation). Google doesn't give two shits about this: they want all of your information. That Google is training people to conflate the process of searching for something with then process of navigating to something is great for them and sucks for Firefox as Firefox kind of has to follow or be screwed and yet it seems a bit antithetical to their mission (though I don't think they even know what their mission is anymore).

(FWIW, the true original sin is the address bar itself: the address bar is a status display of where you are... making it editable is arguably sort of "intuitive"--using the typical kind of "just so" stories that allow people to claim random things are intuitive because the story was flowery enough--but frankly it just makes no sense and causes all kinds of problems. If you fix this, and return to the paradigm that some of the earliest browsers have, I think some of the other things the omnibar does are less awkward, and the "out" for true navigation wouldn't be affected as navigation would feel entirely unlike searching: it would become intuitive that these are separate concepts.)

(Also: the fact that I am unhealthy is not because I don't want to know how to be healthy or because I am not prioritizing understanding it... it is because most of the time I can't for the life of me figure it out even in consultation with doctors, and when I do know things--such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it because I injured myself a couple years ago and I am now somewhat depressed over it. I point this out because it is very different from not knowing or not caring to know: a life un-analyzed and without curiosity at every level of scale and in every interaction would seem to me to be a life wasted. If you truly don't know anything about how a car works, I recommend spending some time to learn: it's fun! Tim isn't like the mechanic ever figured out what was wrong with my car until I finally pulled the error code of the ECU myself and rubbed it in his face. Learn to play at least one musical instrument of every class so that you can extrapolate the rest. Study linguistics as early and as often as you can in life so you can at least appreciate the beauty of other languages even if you don't choose to become fluent. Avoid hiring people to do things for you until you know how to judge if they did a good job, and decide how you wish things to be done before letting other people tell you what they like and then don't back down!)

Clearly the Bookmarks "star icon UI" is physically located in the omnibar, but when I said "settings and bookmarks", that clearly wasn't what I meant- I meant modifying the settings and bookmarks through typing a command in the omnibar the way you'd type a URL or search query. Bookmarks are not in the omnibar the way you can type "INSERT INTO bookmarks SELECT current_website FROM current_window" into the omnibar to add a bookmark. You can't change the settings "UPDATE settings SET setting_value=black WHERE setting_name=theme" by typing into the omnibar.

However, neither of my previous 2 paragraphs really refute any of your points, they're just clarifications. Pointing out that you made a slippery slope fallacy in an analogy doesn't refute your point, and whether Bookmarks are considered "in the omnibar" or not is orthogonal to the discussion. I agree wit the paragraph on "the true original sin", but that's a different note as well.

So, returning to the main issue: I think the cost issue is a valid point, but then everything has a cost. Even putting bottles and cans in the same recycling bin would incur a cost. Then the end question becomes "is it worth incurring this cost?". For a lot of people, they are willing to pay the taxpayer cost to have their recycling be sorted between the bottles and cans and cardboard etc. Do you have a separate recycling bin for glass bottles, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, etc? Or just one recycling bin? Similarly, there is a cost to giving google a tiny bit of additional information- but not much. Plus, they already have your entire browsing history stored on their servers already. Try going to some webpages on Chrome, going to a different device, and check the browser history on the 2nd device- it'll be synced with the first device. So on Chrome, there's no additional privacy cost to combining the url and search bar. Even if you use firefox, there's not a lot of information being leaked with the omnibar that accidentally googled something that was supposed to be an intranet site. For the consumer that doesn't know the difference between a URL and a search, they probably aren't running some sites on their local network anyways.

Considering how low the cost is, I'd say a sizable chunk of people who oppose merging the address bar and the search bar do it out of a purely principled stance where they cannot accept any cost greater than 0, not even 0.00001. I'm not sure if this is a logical position to take, although it makes sense as a philosophical perspective, at least. The other chunk of people are just using it as an excuse to back up a philosophy of "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy", which makes even less sense logically (again, see: brain surgeons, grandparents) or philosophically.

On that note, I absolutely hate the quote "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned". It's one of those cynical quips that just makes the person saying it seem smart, but actually leads you away from the truth. People massively overestimate the concept of a tabula rasa, and not all knowledge is learned. One example I can use against (a good percentage) of tech people is exercise at the gym. If you've ever done squats/bench/deadlift, you know the importance of having a good form. If your form is wrong, it will "feel wrong"- this is something that even absolute beginners at a gym notice, even if they don't have a trainer telling them exactly what is the right form. Another one, (a more interesting subject on the state of the human brain), is observing how people react to certain drugs like acid. Amusingly, novices to psychedelics are always convinced that whatever thought they've just come up with is some groundbreaking revelation, when it's usually something that's been thought of many times before.

> such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it

Isn't this inherently more lazy and/or worse? This would be like someone who knew what a URL is, and then purposefully choosing to search up items in the Firefox URL bar anyways. At least not bothering to learn is excusable- again, I don't really need my brain surgeon to know how a URL works and understand making a DNS query for an infranet site works. But philosophically, this seems like throwing your trash in your mailbox and being okay with it because it would disappear anyways (excuse my slippery slope analogy, heh). And also I can possibly argue that you don't know that much about your health, anyways- for a human body to stay healthy, it needs more than just walking. Putting heavier loads to build muscles (maybe not specifically for hypertrophy, but certainly not just LISS cardio) is important, especially for your back. Also, sustained high intensity cardio is important for your health as well.

I would love to see a virtual reality app that plays with different organism layouts, and solving the usability issues.

There is a lot of great sci-fi that tries to consider how a world would be designed for non-humanoids, or mixed aliens, or the reverse archaeological problem of calculating how aliens look from what they have left behind. I am struggling to think of any sci-fi that makes you deeply think about usability.

The whole Wayfarers series is amazing in my opinion.

The advantage of both of these factors combined is that you don't have to think about editing, or the user interface. You don't have to break the flow of thinking about your code. You type code, you edit code, you rearrange code, and you only ever have to think about the code. You don't have to spare brain cycles to think about editing, your fingers just do it.

It's like learning to touch type. There are two fingered typists who can type almost as fast as I can touch type. Or even six-fingered typists who might be able to go a bit faster. But even though they know where the keys are, they still need to keep an eye on the keyboard to type. They still need to think about the keyboard. But once you learn to touch-type, you don't need to think about typing any more. You just... type. Being able to keeping your eyes on the screen all the time just allows you to concentrate on your code, rather on the way you're entering it.

By turning some conscious actions into muscle memory, it leaves your conscious mind able to spend more time on the things you want to think about.

The thing is, I see the value in my guitar playing. But when I code, much of my time is spent thinking about what I'm coding, and much less for the actual typing and editing, so I don't really see the value for vim. That's why I finished the tutorial, but then never used it in actual coding. Purely my own opinion, of course.

Or that a text search is a perfectly reasonable way to move the cursor seven steps right to the next right paren.

> Being able to keeping your eyes on the screen all the time just allows you to concentrate on your code, rather on the way you're entering it.

I don't see anything here that is special or unique to vim or emacs.

Then think in terms of friction - friction that prevents you from doing what you want.

The reason for pursuing this kind of efficiency in an editor is because the task of writing and editing text files is only means to an end as a programmer: your goal is to encode the program you have in your head in a form the computer could run. To persist a castle in the sand you're building. Your editor is usually the limiting factor on how fast can you do that. And this matter because the faster you go, the less friction you feel, the more time you have for the important part - thinking. If you can do this fast enough, cross a certain efficiency threshold, your mind will collapse the task, erase the perception of typing.

Think of what happens when you learn to drive, truly learn. Your car becomes an extension of your thoughts, not something you consciously give inputs to. Now imagine driving by having to type in commands like "accelerate" or "turn left". Now imagine the same, but through submitting paper forms.

More like having you workbench set up just perfectly, less like having irreplaceable tools. But the start up cost is what keeps me out - learning it, trying to integrate it into other tools that I don't fully understand anyway (VSCode in my case), etc etc.

I strongly disagree with this.

Does anyone remember what connecting to Wifi looked like? I'm talking 15+ years ago. Here's how it would go:

1. Click a network

2. Choose an option from WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 and WPA-PSK

3. Be prompted with a either a password, a key selection or a box that generates a bunch of keys. Enter what you think the password is somewhere;

4. If it doesn't work, return to (2) and try something else.

5. If it works, you win.

That was literally how it worked. And then Apple came along and just prompted you for password. Why? Because the OS can figure out the rest so why ask the user?

You can argue "the user should have basic knowledge of the tools they're using". After all, if they're connecting to a WEP network, they should be aware it's not secure.

But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what?

That's what great product design and interface design is.

Let's also refer to Joel Spolsky's classic "Choices" [1] where he quotes:

> Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision.

and then goes on to (correctly) say:

> That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

>But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what?

Because if it's not secure, and the lack of security results in someone stealing the user's password and wiping their account, the user will indeed care about it.

The user does in fact care about the consequences of the thing he "doesn't care" about; he's just incapable of connecting those. It's like a user not caring about whether there's gas in his car because he knows nothing about cars. He'll care about it when the car stops running.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

- computers are uselessly complex even for simple tasks

- UI changes are pushed by vendors every other year or so, despite providing zero interesting features for users

- there's no IT education, and when there is it's focused on writing a CV on Microsoft Word and sending email, nothing more

All three points could be addressed. And having a proper UX that empowers users with ease can help. I don't think all web users need to know what "URL" means or even what's http://, but they could certainly understand the difference between "location" and "search criteria" if UI was good. Even a simple help box could help: "If you know the address you're going to, type it here. Otherwise, click the search button". The kind of UX that's similar enough to phonebooks and maps so users aren't confused.

Also

> bar should be particularly high

hehe

I couldn't resist adapting your argument for food:

Why exactly should food be accessible for all people at all? When you are too lazy or dumb to grow your own food like it was before the coming of Jesus, you will think that McD's is the agriculture industry. That's the problem with today's agriculture. It's too accessible for too many ignorant people.

And URLs, canonically, don't require DNS to function.

I really don't think they're more difficult than they need to be to be functional. Users' mental model of "an address" is incoherent and often context dependent. Both a URL and an email address are an "address" to most users. The really lost ones will refer to the search terms they use to get to a web page as the "address".

I don't really see URLs as different from addresses. Their in descending size order rather than ascending like physical addresses, but the rest of it is fairly consistent. Most people spend drastically less time thinking about URLs than physical addresses though. We teach children how to break down physical addresses, and we do not teach them to break down URLs. It's entirely unsurprising URLs are more confusing.

> 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.

Phrased differently, it frees them from the requirement to be able to differentiate those two concepts. Much like how my calculator can give me the square root of a number without me needing to know how to actually calculate that.

Like why is the domain big endian and the path small endian? Leads to endless confusion and has been a source of many fraud attacks.

On the other hand a post address is equally unnatural. Street name-> street Number-> Postcode is not in consecutive order of significance. Yet everybody handles such without problem.

A big factor is also unreadable query strings like ?q= instead of simple paths like /search/.

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.

Everybody does mistakes, and i'm not here to throw a stone. But i'm looking for lessons to be shared and learnt.

Calling out is "hey you're doing such bullshit". "How do you feel that what you did had this consequence?" is opening a debate to share experiences, not "calling out".

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.

Address bar: I know what I want and I want it to only search in bookmarks and history.

Search bar: I don't quite know what I want and I want to open an internet search for it. And possibly give suggestions from actual search results.

Separating the address and search bars is the first thing I do when I set up a new Firefox. I hope it will stay around but I'm somewhat bracing myself for it to go away eventually.

Press space? Not every use case has to be addressed by UI elements, especially when we're talking about edge cases

Firefox (and Edge; don't know about Chrome as I don't use it) still have the concept of "Search Keywords" that you can prefix searches with to get into search modes for against specific non-default search providers. For instance in the Firefox bar you can type @wikipedia and go directly to a Wikipedia Search mode.

> If you have enabled Emacs-style text editing shortcuts in GNOME, they will also work in Firefox. When an Emacs text editing shortcut conflicts with the default shortcuts (as occurs with Ctrl+K), the Emacs shortcut will take precedence if focus is inside a text box (which would include the address bar and search bar). In such cases you should use the alternate keyboard shortcut if one is listed below.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

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.

Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car. How to handle it, what would break it, traffic rules etc. Why don't we demand that cars become so smart that a 16yo can just buy one, jump on all the pedals and turn all knobs and be a safe while doing so because the car will prevent anything bad from happening? We somehow accept that driving a car is something non-trivial that has to be learned, has certain rules that need to be followed, etc.

At the same time, nobody ever questions what you don't learn to drive a car. You have one acceleration pedal; you don't have separate controls for the fuel/air mixture and ignition timings. You don't manually control the differential. You have one brake pedal, not separate ones for the front and rear brakes, and automatic anti-lock braking is even a useful safety feature.

Modern cars even have warnings for tire pressure, so the driver has less need to manually check.

Modern cars are so smart that a 16 year old can buy one and drive it without having to know how to rebuild the engine, unlike cars of a hundred years ago.

The trick is that we have a long cultural history of deciding just what aspects of car driving are non-trivial and need to be learned and what aspects can be automated successfully (or even beneficially). Consumer computing is still in its relative infancy, and it's a moving target.

[0] Or a domain...even the most tech-savvy among us probably types in domains without examining the difference between a domain and a URL or how software might detect whether a given string looks like a domain

My passenger had my phone number memorized. I went to visit him when he called me from jail. I used his gmail password to get his contacts' phone numbers to try to get someone else to bail him out, but it was only $300. After a few days I paid up to bail him out. He missed his next court date. I went to the bail revocation hearing a couple months later, and got $200 of that $300 back (iirc).

I make an effort to regularly exercise my mental phonebook, on his account.

Who are your lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html

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.

I would not even be surprised if that kind of user would search "Google" on the dedicated "Search box" because they are more confortable performing the search on the actual Google website than on a UI element inside the browser toolbar.

Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.

My point was just that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from user behaviour because user behaviour is often dumb and a poor signal of what users actually want.

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'm tech-savvy and I use Facebook all the time. :-P

Going off-topic here, but outside of Facebook's issues with privacy, I think Facebook is a fine platform. Most of the issues people have with Facebook (again, ignoring the privacy issues) are self-inflicted. You have a racist uncle and don't want to see his bigotry in your feed? Unfollow him. Or in my case, just unfriend him entirely. You want to follow your government representatives to see what's on their mind? Great, just don't engage with the morons in the comment section.

Facebook is a great way to keep up with what your friends are up to. A friend of mine recently went on a trip to Scotland, and I enjoyed his posts on what he was doing. When I got married, it was an easy way to share the photos, since nobody uses Flickr these days.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

This is _massively_ shifting the goalposts. From a personal user perspective, the privacy issues are pretty much the entirety of the problem with Facebook.

But you're also missing the fact that Facebook _itself_ is A Bad Thing for the world, even if it is locally useful as a product. The parent commenter is presumably saying that it would be a good thing if Facebook did not exist (I agree), not just that it would be a good thing for each individual person if they didn't use Facebook. Even if _you_ unfollow your racist uncle, he's continuing to use the platform to hear and spread more racist invective.

> Even if _you_ unfollow your racist uncle, he's continuing to use the platform to hear and spread more racist invective.

They will ALWAYS have a platform, whether its Facebook, Parler, Gab, or Voat. It doesn't matter to me if they're on the same platform as me if I don't see it.

---

> The privacy issues don't actually bother me much[...]I'll just run uBlock Origin[...]

That's nice (and I, too, have my own ways for mitigating some of the worst bits of Facebook), but the very fact that you are having to take steps to "protect yourself" from Facebook demonstrates that it is a flawed platform. The vast majority of users are either going to be unaware of those issues, or unable to mitigate them. This is (and I want to emphasise this, because it runs contrary to a common attitude on HN) *not their fault*. It is not reasonable to expect the average computer user to know how to install extensions, nor which ones are important and trustworthy. It would be a wonderful world if they did, but . The fact that we technically-minded folks _can_ mitigate the effects of Facebook's undesirable behaviour for ourselves, does not excuse that behaviour.

(I also think it's a little unimaginative to think that Facebook's tracking is _only_ used to serve ads, and that you will always be able to mitigate all impacts of that tracking - but that's veering into speculation)

> It doesn't matter to me if they're on the same platform as me if I don't see it.

It should do. The harm of extremizing communication is not (only) to the people that see the communication - it is in the outcome of that positive feedback experience. The end result of "communication that you don't see" is "real-world actions that you do see". Would you similarly say "It doesn't matter to me if the KKK are gathering to plan lynchings, so long as they hold their meetings behind closed doors and hand out their flyers on streets I don't frequent"?

Facebook is the largest and most accessible social platform in the world. There _is_ a difference between "Hate groups can collaborate and gather members on Facebook" and "etc. etc. on Parler/Gab", because the former allows them _much_ greater access to fence-sitters, the undecided, the less-politically-aware, and so on. Everyone and their aunt is on Facebook, but (mostly) only those who already hold a particular ideology find themselves on the alternative sites. If hate-groups can only recruit from among those who already agree with their credo, they're going to find it harder to grow - which is a good thing.

I didn't have a racist uncle - at least not until he started spending too much time on Facebook and reading every piece of racist garbage the algorithm fed him.

I didn't have an anti-vaxxer mom, but guess what.

Helps me tremendously in that exact issue.

Meanwhile, the omnibar changes old UX behavior to allow Google to MITM requests if people don't recognize it and update how they work. And most people didn't.

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

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 am technical and I often just search instead of URL just because it requires less precision.

Google is just DNS with a few extra steps.

That should appeal to the older crowd.

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.

Having a clutch gives you a lot of fine grained control

Meanwhile FF still allows people to choose at least.

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.

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.

You've got weak spots in the tech stack too. I'd wager there are tools that you use without knowing even about their existence. The point isn't to do dumb shit, the point is to have empathy and consider the perspective of other humans who are just as intelligent as you but knowledgeable in different domains.

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.

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!

On any "real" use-case scenario, typing "google" into the omnibar and hitting enter, should take you directly to google.com.

I can just type g and hit enter on my browser, and it still takes me to google.com

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

I can't really count anymore how often omnibar just searched for some local domain I tried to type in, in a search engine, instead of just telling me that domain doesn't exist because I made a typo or whatever.

Having to type https:// in front of every URL is also not very pleasant, especially on mobile phones.

Also browsers assuming that anything outside of PSL is to be searched in a search engine right away instead of resolved as a domain, is another annoyance for this user. At least the browser could be less stupid and consider local search domains part of PSL, but no.

So whether omnibar is more of a hindrance than help depends on the user/use case.

I also kinda like the distinction that ctrl+l is only searching locally in bookmarks/history and ctrl+k is public search.

I think that at that time Firefox still struggled with single-word searches from the address bar, treating them as domain names; if so, that was probably the last material difference (as distinct from social) before Firefox could reasonably remove the search box by default.

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).

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.

For the single word searches, I've never noticed such a problem. It should try to resolve it first, in case it exists on your LAN, and falling back to search works fine for me.

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

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.

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#...

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".

The search bar still exists in Firefox if you want it to btw. I use it daily.

I didn't know you could add the search bar but when you do, the address bar still says "Search with <your default search> or enter address".

I have browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirst=false

about:config -> keyword.enabled -> false (to stop sending possible search terms automatically to your default search engine, this includes when you type a URL firefox mistakes for a search term)

about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -> false (to stop firefox trying a DNS lookup/connection with the term you typed with www. before, .com after)

"The box at the top where you type in websites you want to go to."

"What are you talking about? I'm computer illiterate, I can't learn any of this fancy tech stuff. I just click my facebook icon and it comes up!"

These people get all sorts of confused when something happens in their browser and the new tab page's recently visited list gets cleared out...

This learned helplessness scares me a bit. It's like the willingness to comprehend stops at "tap".

"What are you talking about, 'steering wheel'?! I'm not a greasemonkey, are you talking about the thing I turn to make the car turn?"

Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another.

Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think people underestimate how powerful concepts like the recycling bin are, history, etc... in making people feel a bit more confident about experimenting.

How to translate that stuff to completely computer-illiterate people is a big challenge. But my experience is that when people feel like it's really easy to revert mistakes, they tend to experiment more and they tend to be bolder about trying to solve their own problems. And in the opposite direction, as they learn more that computers are dangerous even in specific areas, that can bleed over into other contexts and make them scared of trying things in other programs and with other devices.

When I see people who aren't willing to try and figure out what a URL bar is or who are scared to move files around or organize a directory or bookmarks, I sometimes wonder what the rest of their computer looks like and if they're channeling anxieties with other programs.

Of course, that's only one aspect of the problem though, it's an issue with multiple causes.

I think this is correct. Turning the steering wheel never randomly creates a bunch of new problems for the user that they don't understand. It works the same way every time over the course of the user's entire life. I've probably made millions of turns of a steering wheel and all it's ever done is turn the wheels.

The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.

I think the big problem here is everyone of the big players “giving up” and trying to obscure and abstract as much as possible rather than make things clear.

Most people understand a phone number +[country] (area) (number).

Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?

Google and Apple have really set the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.

Yes. http[s]://www.facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params and http[s]://evil.co/facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params are very different things, but naïvely presented the visual weight is not on the important parts.

So yes, URLs are way more complex.

I’d wager most Americans don’t know what our country code is or what country codes are. Just say’n.

Having seen the kind of situations (untrained) drivers get themselves into while looking at a complete loss of how to proceed, I would like to vehemently disagree.

That's why most western countries have something that passes for "training" as an requirement to be allowed to drive.

No such thing with computers.

With this analogy I suppose an omnibar would be like a self-driving car? Or maybe just an automatic transmission?

For me, a better car analogy would be something like the fact that your radio controls can't mess with your brakes. You don't have to worry that if you change your radio station that your car suddenly won't start. This means that you probably don't feel nearly as worried about messing with those controls in an unfamiliar rental car. The entertainment system is never going to brick your car and make it impossible to drive (well, in most cars it can't).

----

That's still a kind of tortured analogy though, so I'll dispense with the analogies entirely and just talk technology. When I teach people how to use Git, some of the most important early commands I teach them after the basic data model are:

`git reflog`

`git reset <ref>`

`git rebase -i <ref>` (and importantly, I wire this up to something other than Vim)

I have observed anecdotally that people who have a good grasp of `git reflog` are much more likely to experiment with branching strategies, rebases, and merges, and are much more likely to come up with creative ways to solve their problems. Why? Because they're no longer scared of blowing up their entire repo.

I used to leave those more "complicated" commands out of early conversations with people because I felt like I would be dropping too many concepts on them too quickly, but without that kind of confidence that says "I can undo any Git operation, swap my head to any reference, and reorder, merge and customize any set of commits from any branch", people treated Git more like a set of arcane symbols and they were scared to ever experiment or try to extrapolate to solve their problems, even when their problems could be solved using commands they already knew.

Git could be a lot better about this stuff; the lesson I take is that I want to have very clear designations between dangerous and safe operations, and I want my interfaces to teach people where the undo key is first.

----

You can probably think of other Linux tools that demonstrate this issue as well. It took us a long time to get safety locks around `rm -rf /`. In some ways, the point of those safety locks isn't just to help protect the reckless people who do irresponsible things without thinking. It's also to give more confidence to people who are learning basic terminal commands/Bash that they're not going to accidentally mess up a pipe or regex expression and delete their entire hard drive if they try to experiment a little bit.

We can take that even a step further, one of the best things you can do if you're learning Linux is get a good, reliable hard drive clone pushing regularly to a backup. You'll be in a better position to learn how the low-level system works if you know in the back of your head that you can always just blow the entire thing a way and rewind back a few days whenever you want.

As a matter of personal philosophy, I agree - but on the level of "empathy for users" this misses the mark pretty widely.

The 'steering wheel' analogy is not applicable (but funny!) because unlike computers, everyone who drives has been licensed so there's a baseline level of education that isn't there for computing. Also, most people (at least in the US) grew up around cars, so you expect a 20 year old and a 70 year old to grasp what a steering wheel is. But likely the people you are making fun of here did not grow up with computing. They are older folks to whom the computer was presented as a way to solve some specific problem (eg: a series of clicks so I can zoom with the grandkids) rather than a general platform that you perceive it as.

You can still say "well, there's a computer now in your life so you should learn about that" and again personally I agree, but - you gotta admit there are things in your life that you could go deeper on but you simply aren't comfortable or interested in doing so. For example, do you know the anatomy of every muscle in your body? Are you perfectly comfortable with public speaking? Are you able to articulate the nuances of policy difference between two local politicians running for office in your area? These are examples of things that you come in contact with on daily basis, and (if you are like most people) you probably did not go as deep in on as you could (and arguably should). Even if you happen to be good at these specific things you can get the larger point that people don't and can't go "deep" on everything they encounter. It may seem weird to you that to someone that thing is their computer, but those people may know things that you don't, also.

For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.

That's exactly right, the car industry has done a remarkable job maintaining interface compatibility for over a century despite massive implementation changes.

Someone who knew how to "hit the brakes" on a 1908 Model-T will be able to do it in my 2021 Toyota. Despite the fact that my car has regenerative breaking (and ABS and other things) which means that how the pedal does its thing is totally different.

Even the new additions over the basic interface feel pretty optional. EG, my car has radar cruise control but someone can drive the car for 10 years and not notice that button. If you want to drive my car the same way you drove the Model-T, you pretty much can.

There are three pedals and a throttle pusher on the wheel. The brake is on the right, the middle pedal is reverse. To accelerate, you work a combination of left pedal to select gear, handbrake/clutch, and a pusher for throttle on the steering wheel.

You would need retraining to go from this to a modern car or vice versa.

You got me! I actually knew this but wanted to make my point. Technically my post is correct because I focused on the operation of the brake pedal specifically but it definitely doesn't stand to this level of scrutiny :)

I think we've all had relatives do something and then be unable to "get it back". Task bars deleted, icons deleted, etc.

So they don't try to venture too far out because past experiences make everything seem fragile.

Computers also used to be only for those willing to geek out and geniuses. Now they are used without thinking too much about them.

I just hope nobody would mishear it as "shot". That could be unpleasant.

Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want.

Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.

And that's unironically a good thing. To poorly paraphrase Alan Kay, you know a certain piece of technology works when it gets out of the way and becomes second nature.

However we're now encountering one of those pesky questions that we never hear about in sci-fi because it's hard to solve and it's not fun for authors to write about: are we setting up future generations for failure by making technology too easy? And it's most likely "yes". I wonder out loud: are children not getting courses on how to use a desktop computer anymore like they used to in the 90s/2000s? It seems like it. Even if they never encounter having to browse a file system again until they graduate, the fact that it's at least introduced to them while their brains are still terrific sponges would be beneficial.

I've never had to do long division after ~6th grade, but given a few minutes of recall, I can get right back into it because of the rote learning I had.

File directories, and the filesystem generally, confuse the hell out of the vast majority of computer users. We nerds forget this stuff because at age 12 we really gave a shit about it and took the time to internalize what it all means, and it's been second nature ever since, but most people haven't had the "a-ha" moment we did about it, so far back we've almost forgotten we needed an "a-ha" moment for something so "simple and obvious".

We get that this over here and that over there "are" the same thing, but that neither "is" the thing it's representing, which may also be represented entirely differently over in this other place. When we search in a file explorer window and it "becomes" something totally different, we get what's happened and that nothing's "gone anywhere". Normal people don't.

Consider the Windows 3.1 interactive mouse tutorial/Windows tutorial. [0] This was designed for an age where both mice and Windows were relatively new and people didn't know how to use them, and it's one of the better designed tutorials out there, I think, allowing the user to interact with the tutorial and instantly see the results of their actions.

However, nowadays if you try to look up a tutorial on how to use a mouse, you're probably not going to find very much. The best I could find was hosted at gcfglobal.org [1], and explained the concepts and how to do things with a mouse, and has relevant interactive parts, but requires knowledge of how to scroll the page (which it does tell you how to do at the top, but there's only so much room there). There was also a set of pages called hosted at pbclibrary.org [2] which goes over the mouse basics and doesn't require scrolling before the concept is introduced, but it's somewhat outdated.

But those two were about it. The rest were mostly non-interactive videos. And in all these cases, discovery is a major problem - most of the time, the only way you're going to be able to get to those in the first place is through someone who already knows how to use a mouse.

We're all assuming that schools are teaching these basics. But what if they're not?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmFzIllvHzU

[1] https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/mousetutorial/mouse-tutorial/1/

[2] http://www.pbclibrary.org/mousing/

There was some series of essays recently that I read (linked from HN maybe) that went into some details about the economic differences between search-based desktop computing and "juicy springboard of icons" mobile computing.

Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.

It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.

They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.

I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.

I wonder what things will look in 20 years.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

As things get more and more offloaded to the cloud, local computing is something only developers, engineers, and geeks will properly understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.

To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.

You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.

Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.

The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).

Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.

I assume this is deliberate. Amazon doesn't want you clicking on URLs that don't point to Amazon. A search bar that doesn't do an internet search, but looks like a browser search bar, would seem to fit the bill.

I believe Amazon will fade away, once that bald guy reaches the orbit of Saturn. It's basically just an online shop with low prices - I can't see any USP.

Incidentally, the combined URL-and-search bar (is that still called the "awesomebar"? It's not awesome) in my version of Firefox (93.0, running on Windows 10) doesn't actually let me search, unless I select a search engine. If I search for "red shoes", it tries to take me to "redshoes.com". If I search for "red doctor martens", it says it can't find a site with that name. I have to choose a search engine, even if I only have one search engine configured. I suppose I must have broken something.

I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.

But if you use a computer to access resources and services on the web, you probably do so much more frequently than you change your oil. I'd liken it more to knowing how the turn signals, headlight controls, and wipers work on a car.

You don't need to know how to repair those items or how exactly they operate. But since that familiarity is something inherent to the operation of a car, you should at least know the basics of usage if you plan to do much driving.

Going off on a tangent:

I thought that this would be the case when I switched to changing my own oil -- if I was feeling lazy, I could always have the shop do it. But I found out right away that when the local quick-change place does it, they tighten the drain plug and oil filter to roughly a zillion ft-lbs. So if I pay them to do it, I am making the job way more of a pain in the butt for myself next time I want to do it, because I'll spend half an hour just struggling to remove those.

At some point I just decided it was worth the extra cost to be in and out quickly. And honestly, when you add up the cost of replacement filter and oil, the premium isn't terrible when you add in time saved. I like knowing how to do it, but it's been several years since I bothered.

We moved to a bigger property, have 5 cars. It's easier now to change 2 or 3 at a time.

Really?

I don't believe there exists a task I theoretically could perform if I knew the steps, that I would be unable to do if those steps were being explained to me by an expert. Even if it was gardening or cooking (two areas I have extremely little interest in). In my mind, this very concept doesn't parse.

On the other hand, I do know people like this, and I hate helping others with computers over the phone.

I believe this has nothing to do with one's intelligence or familiarity. More like some kind of general intellectual or emotional "closedness" - an instinctive refusal to do things out of one's comfort zone, even if one is guided step-by-step, and refusing to take those steps causes a huge loss. I have no idea how this comes about, as it's totally alien to me, except that I see it in most people.

Most people can't do those initially no matter how much an expert explains it - until they build up the muscle memory. Cooking and gardening are like that but to a much lesser extent.

Of course typing into a URL bar is nothing like that.

With references to gardening, I meant stuff like e.g. how to correctly replant a flower. I have no first clue how to do it, but I'm confident I could do it successfully if I had a gardener guiding me through the process step by step.

This is amazingly and surprisingly difficult thing to explain over the phone to “normal” (born before computers were prevalent) people.

Basically I got it divided in two groups: those who have used internet for the first time after 18 years old (hardest group. Have to explain in terms of geometrical figures, like lines and rectangles on top of the screen, where in this rectangle is a good place to click and how to drag, and what a successful drag looks like), and the others (those I can explain how to “drag a tab”, because they already know what a tab is).

The address bar is more easy, I refer to it as the place where you type the site where you want to go (but very often people never type addresses, they open google and start from there, always).

This got me into thinking about getting old, more than once. How can I prevent this to myself (being totally confused and out of touch with current technology when I get older).

There, FTFY. Now geroffmylawn.

    - [Users/Drivers/Students] don't really understand [interfaces/traffic/life]
    - [Computers/infrastructure/schools] don't really understand [users/drivers/students]
    - [Big Data/City Planners/Education Dept.] assumes that [users/drivers/students] are behaving in semi-rational manner

It is like the most meta description of how things are that I believe anyone has ever come up with!

You don’t need to be a naive user to make this mistake. The problem is that your brain is thinking “search”, your eyes are looking for something that looks like a search input, and when you find one you click it and start typing.

I feel like that’s what’s going wrong in this example too; it’s not that people expect Amazon to bring them to any random webpage, it’s just that there are two similar looking text inputs very close together on the screen.

I've often joked that one of the core skills of a programmer is to be able to look at a terminal scrolling a full screen of text every quarter of a second or so, and extract useful information from it. I've lost track of the times I've seen something "different" and had to scroll up dozens of screens to find what I happened to see.

This is a job-specific skill like a mechanic diagnosing a complicated machine's problem from the particular way a single knocking sound sounded, or a doctor glancing at you and telling you you have some obscure disease that you've never heard of because you have some particular droop in your eyelids. This is not the way the non-programming public perceives a computer screen.

I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen.

To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself higher than whatever website it is currently loaded. And even more than this, my brain perceives the website to be "deeper" inside the screen than anything else.

Even right now typing this, the text area to me is "dug" inside the HN, making HN feel closer to my eyes than the texarea for the reply.

I wonder if that's experienced by others as well.

https://pics.computerbase.de/5/7/4/1/0/1-1080.130195173.jpg

https://i1.wp.com/www.thespinningdonut.com/wp-content/upload...

Everything had bevels (XP) and/or shading (Vista) that evoked a 3D appearance. Buttons are extruded (and appear to physically move down when pushed), menus overlay each other, text boxes are "inset".

Nowadays though... it is apparently a cardinal sin to even make clickable things appear clickable. Looking at you, Windows/Office!

As a side note I found it comical that they're using computer UI-styled buttons printed onto actual paper on a physical machine instead of "real" push buttons, but I guess it's a cost-saving thing.

Chrome followed suit later that year, because by the time Chrome hit the market, awesomebar had demonstrated its utility for end users.

Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning.

People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.

I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me

Hmmm. It took me a while to figure out that you weren't referring to sites for angling enthusiasts.

Allowing the URL bar to also act as search or vice versa, the simple act of trying to do the one thing now does something else that you might or might not have intended or been aware of being possible is not the same as a single purpose choke. When that possible thing is sending your data to a 3rd party, then that is just bad.

Edit: finished an incomplete thought

Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.

We could equivalently ask why ftp and http and https and such don't have different types of entry uis, since they're different protocols. If we consider the "resource location via plain language" protocol (which we could even formalize!) that defers to http(s), ftp, Tor, and Bing based on aspects of the request, it's just one higher level protocol.

I wouldn't call it bad behaviour. Why are the users behaving bad and not the interfaces? Computers are meant to serve users.