Re:How We Got the Favicon (2017)
by neilv on Monday August 10, 2020 @12:27PM
(#24110996)
I've never heard the definitive story of how autocomplete got added to the URL bar, but it might've been a particular route from Emacs...
I was talking with a manager for one of the Web browsers in '96, and mentioned a little Emacs add-on, https://www.neilvandyke.org/webjump/ , which combined Emacs autocompletion with a bunch of arbitrary site-specific code to be a smart hotlist/bookmarks/search/etc. for Web browsers. The manager suddenly ignored everything else we were talking about, which I thought was more important, and drilled down into this little Emacs curiosity. Next thing I knew, completion was added to their browser's URL bar (but not the other things WebJump did).
The autocompletion wasn't my invention (it might've been Emacs's, decades earlier), of course, and a lot of people knew about it, including via noted Emacs hacker JWZ famously at Netscape, so there are numerous other paths it could've coincidentally gotten into browsers. I'd just be slightly tickled if that one conversation happened to be the prompt for someone's effort to add it.
I was talking with a manager for one of the Web browsers in '96, and mentioned a little Emacs add-on, https://www.neilvandyke.org/webjump/ , which combined Emacs autocompletion with a bunch of arbitrary site-specific code to be a smart hotlist/bookmarks/search/etc. for Web browsers. The manager suddenly ignored everything else we were talking about, which I thought was more important, and drilled down into this little Emacs curiosity. Next thing I knew, completion was added to their browser's URL bar (but not the other things WebJump did).
The autocompletion wasn't my invention (it might've been Emacs's, decades earlier), of course, and a lot of people knew about it, including via noted Emacs hacker JWZ famously at Netscape, so there are numerous other paths it could've coincidentally gotten into browsers. I'd just be slightly tickled if that one conversation happened to be the prompt for someone's effort to add it.