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by gregmac 2132 days ago
To me, the single bar functions kind of like a CLI for the browser. I regularly use it to:

* Type/paste a URL

* Type/paste a search

* Search my browser history (usually to jump to a previous URL)

* Use search engine keywords to do direct searches on some applications I use regularly (eg, "jira P-123" does a search in JIRA directly, which happens to jump to that ticket directly)

Browsers that separate those two drive me a bit crazy, because of the extra thinking required before typing.

(I don't really like this whole "using the first search term as DNS lookup" but that's separate from the UX of single vs separate inputs.)

1 comments

There is no extra thinking, at least for me: search on the right, URLs and history on the left. I mean: it's automatic, my fingers know what to do. I guess search engine keywords would go to the right too but I don't use that feature.
Firefox's UI is kind of all over the place, but I love that I can paste or type a search term, and then arrow-key my way down to a set of search options at the bottom.