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.)

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.

They design for an audience that, on average, cannot distinguish betweeen the address bar of the browser and the search bar on the Google homepage.

This isn't always a good thing.

My grandmother doesn't know the difference between an "address bar" or "search bar". Recently she got an email from her insurance company telling her to go to their website www.whateverinsurance.com and click "sign in" and then click "my account" and update her credit card info. The email had the url but it wasn't a link for some stupid reason. She goes to her browser and types in "www .whateverinsurance..com" because her eyesight isn't very good anymore and presses enter. Then instead of giving her an error saying the website doesn't exist and she should re-try entering it, it goes to a Google search page! She clicks "sign in" but her password doesn't work because she's on Google instead of her insurance website. So I get a call and have to figure out why her "insurance isn't working".

When I finally get her to her insurance website, she mistypes her password and presses "log in", and nothing happens. Windows is configured with 175% magnification, which means that the "invalid password" div that appears isn't visible on her screen unless she scrolls to the top of the page!

She originally tried calling her insurance company and updating her credit card number by phone, but she couldn't enter her credit card number fast enough and it timed out and told her to go to the website instead. WHY DON'T THEY TEST THIS STUFF???!?

Sorry, I went on a tangent there. I get irrationally upset by this kind of stuff.

Computers are bad and we should feel bad.

I mean after a certain point you just have to accept the kinds of things that your users will type in whatever text boxes you show them and make it work. If you know what the user is trying to do then it's not good UX to throw an error or tell them "I know you're trying to search, but I won't until you retype it into this other box".

Google Maps is a good example of this. Like the original text box you were shown was searching for an address but enough people typed business search terms that eventually they just implemented that feature.

The Ansible vault is a bad example of this. They have a little command `ansible-vault` that lets you manage encrypted files and strings. If you run `ansible-vault edit ./nonexistent_file` it tells you that you meant `ansible-vault create` and vice versa but doesn't just do it despite the user intent being clear. This ultimately lead me to just patching it to do the right thing.

> The Ansible vault is a bad example of this. They have a little command `ansible-vault` that lets you manage encrypted files and strings. If you run `ansible-vault edit ./nonexistent_file` it tells you that you meant `ansible-vault create` and vice versa but doesn't just do it despite the user intent being clear. This ultimately lead me to just patching it to do the right thing.

IMO it's a bit much to decide what "the right thing" is there. Blindly assuming that someone attempting to edit credentials didn't mistype a file name isn't exactly safe and sounds like a great way to cause problems based on believing you updated something you did not in fact update.

That was my first thought as well. This is going to lead to people typo'ing, opening a blank file, being confused that their credentials are gone, and then adding in the updated credentials in the wrong place.

FYI:

CTRL-L: focus URL bar, typed text will be navigated to or searched for

CTRL-K: focus URL bar, typed text will be searched for

(same in Firefox, with the distinction that Firefox has two UI elements instead of one)

FYI

ALT + D: focus URL bar, typed text will be navigated to or searched for

CTRL + E: focus URL bar, typed text will be searched for

(I find those better since they can be used with my left hand only)

Because it's designed to make as many Google queries as possible instead of being geared for URL entry.