[judge2020]

Back when IE was king and there were separate search/address bars, everyone I knew either went to search engine websites or used the search bar. Only those in my tech-literate circle occasionally typed in full domain names when they knew exactly what website they want to go to. The web was marketed as a place to "find anything", and the address bar didn't do that for the regular user.

[loup-vaillant]

True, and a big reason why Google effectively removed the address bar. People are now too dumb to type addresses? Let's them fall back to our search engine even more often than they originally did.

Now when I'm typing an URL, I must make sure it has a valid syntax, because otherwise I'm redirected to the search engine right away. Kind of annoying, since one reason I don't go through the search engine is to avoid being tracked.

(Less of a problem now that I use DuckDuckGo by default, though.)

[acdha]

> People are now too dumb to type addresses?

This is unwarranted condescension. Many URLs are long and non-obvious — do remember that people usually want specific pages rather than a top-level homepage — and there's a thriving industry registering domains which are one typo away from something legitimate and loading them up with ads & malware. For the average person, it's safer and faster just to let Google figure it out.

> Now when I'm typing an URL, I must make sure it has a valid syntax, because otherwise I'm redirected to the search engine right away.

I don't know about Chrome but Firefox shows the status while you're typing so you can tell when you've entered something such as a space which will cause it to be treated as a search query instead.

[loup-vaillant]

> For the average person, it's safer and faster just to let Google figure it out.

Of course. Only a genius like me can use the address bar's auto completion. I know: even my programmers colleagues at work reach for the search bar, I must be a unique snowflake.

Seriously though, the difference isn't that big, barely a speed bump. But that speed bump is enough to cause people to go around it, and use Google even when reaching for something as simple as news.ycombinator.com!

I think it's less a matter of capability, and more a misunderstanding of the costs. Giving your search terms away doesn't seem like such a bad deal, considering the search engine is free to use. We just tend to forget that we pay with our data, and that data is valuable because it will later be used to sell us things we would otherwise not have bought.

But such a cost is so indirect and so removed from its actual cause that we tend to just ignore it. I know I often do.

[acdha]

I agree that there's a downside to having search as a fallback to locations but try to be a bit more empathetic for the people who might type something like “support.apple.com” as “supportapple.com” and end up somewhere sketchy.

If they've previously hit the site before, autocompletion will work but lots of people hear about sites in contexts which don't give them a direct clickable link on the computer they want to use and they're a lot more likely to have a negative outcome from that than Google's data mining.

[drilldrive]

I still keep my search and address bar separate, mainly because the search bar is static across tabs, whereas the address bar loses information whenever I click away. I like a bit of both styles, though I generally use the search bar.

[48309248302]

You can still do that in Firefox. It's in the settings.