They don't know what a url is, and to them the address bar is the search box, and the search box is the address bar. Developers of all the major browsers made the two elements work interchangeably.

A power user can create a web navigation system with plug-ins and customizations that rival a space shuttle for complexity and sophistication. The novice user, and users that are tech challenged can get stuck on the most basic uses of browsers. The trouble with catering to the "bad users" is that every forced simplification removes an opportunity for learning to be better. Every removed and hidden feature "for their own good" amplifies the feedback loop of dumbing down the user of the software, enabling a stasis of competence hovering around some arbitrarily chosen threshold of functionality.

In the case of big tech, keeping users dumb and incompetent is a tool to reinforce the walled gardens. Keeping the consumer ignorant of nuance and flexibility creates artificial problems that are solved with more dumb software, gatekeeping every possible increment of utility by making everything a commercial transaction.

I had a user who was proudly showing me a 99 cent app that allowed them to ping things from their phone. When I showed them the command line and that they'd already had the ability to do that from their laptop, they were embarrassed and a little annoyed.

Their ignorance was encouraged and cultivated throughout the time they spent trying to find a solution to a problem, guiding them to an app store and to waste money on an app.

Artificial incompetence is the defining feature of those who reside in walled gardens. It seems to be the rock bottom to which big tech companies race, because it's the most efficient way to perpetuate a revenue stream. Not only treating people as incompetents, but developing the ux and ui around that core assumption.

There's definitely a place for simplicity and user friendly design, but artificial incompetence is a scourge, one of the worst anti-patterns affecting consumers. There needs to be a culture shift away from rent seeking software design and toward making users as competent and knowledgeable as possible.

Adding more fuel to the fire is that most of the benefit in learning the underlying principles of software is being able to build, modify and introspect it. In a terminal, to view a text file, you could use cat. On a phone, you download an app. However, you can't pipe your Free TXT Viewer 2000 to another app (and if you could, it would probably inject ads). As the walled garden closes in, the incentives to learn diminish as being able to accomplish anything with such acquired knowledge will be severely limited.

Your phone has a different operational workflow than your command line. Yes you're not going to "pipe" it, but on my phone I can open an image in my Photos app, click 'share to' and share (open) it either into my Messages app, a file manager app, or an editor, which opens it just fine. Apps can absolutely share data between them. But not in the sense that an output buffer of the program is being injected into another. That really doesn't apply to GUI apps even on your desktop.

> Developers of all the major browsers made the two elements work interchangeably.

You can still disable that in firefox, but it is so badly tested that it somehow breaks the search field on its default home screen.

“Artificial incompetence”

Good one. I’ll be using it. Thanks for that.

> the address bar is the search box

I'm talking about people using the address bar just enough to get to google. Once they're looking at the text field where you're invited to enter your search terms, there they type in "www.whatever.com".

And then, after years of being conditioned to treat the first result as an ad, they skip over the link that's clearly labeled "whatever.com", instead clicking the second or third one down for "Get whatever here" and are phished by it.

> Observe many people and you’ll see a maddening pattern of browser use: they will use any available method to get to google, and then they will put a url into the google search text box. Perhaps the address bar is inconveniently too high on the screen, or maybe they just don’t know what a url is.

I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.

Well they are grateful to me when I change their default search engine for convenience. But when pointing out that they can just type their search terms into the address bar, I am given the indulgent, polite "thank you but not interested in this microefficiency" smile.

> "thank you but not interested in this micro efficiency" smile

I've seen a friend press caps lock, type a letter and press caps again to type capital letters. That's the smile I got when I introduced them the shift key.

Also the smile my niece had when the car mechanic was explaining to him how he could spare some gas money by up-shifting early.

Also the smile I had when my wife was giving me tips on how to plan meetings better.

Humans suck :)

When we follow the good suggestion, we don't suck at all. That's how humans should work.

It's when we reject the wise advice because... because we're stubborn?... that is when it sucks.

The thing about this url search is that they type the full url, sometimes even with the "http" bit (rarely https, but I digress), into the search field. then they get the results page a second or two later, and then _maybe_ they click the correct result if they didn't get mislead by some crappy SEO magic.

That's a lot of extra work just to get to hopefully arrive at the same page they would have arrived at had they typed that url into the address field.

> Also the smile my niece had when the car mechanic was explaining to him how he could

Apologies if it was just a typo, but in case English is a second/nth language just FYI that your 'niece' is your brother or sister's daughter; I think you mean 'nephew' (brother or sister's son).

(And, er, if a niece 'identifies' as 'he/him', then I would assume (but who am I to tell them etc.) they would also identify as a son and a nephew thenceforward.)

Nephew it is, then! Thanks for the correction!

It's the response of "I don't care about this thing, and I don't care about improving it, so please stop making me waste my attention on the thing I don't care about."

In many people nowadays the scarce resource is not time or even money, but attention; and not every aspect in your life is worth your attention to try and improve it, that's premature optimization, wasting effort on improving something that ultimately is insignificant.

Everyone does the caps lock thing now, I blame phones, but they must know about Shift to type!"£$%^&*() etc, surely.

Shift on a keyboard is different from shift on phones. On a keyboard you hold two keys down at the same time; on a phone you don't. This is why people use Caps Lock for typing capital letters, so they can press one key at a time.

> "thank you but not interested in this microefficiency"

This one. Blows my mind every time.

> I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.

I go to google.com rather than searching trough the address bar because the google.com homepage has a link to tell it "no, I did not actually want German google" whenever it forgets those cookies while the search result pages do not have that link.

Of course for a while now it will still push localized results with no way to disable that.

> Since for many (most?) people, the word “google” is a verb meaning to search the web

I've started to really oppose that, and avoid it in my own speech. ('search' is fine.)

It may sound like a stupid trivial thing, but language is so.. powerful/important, and I don't need Google ingrained in mine. It was difficult/didn't come naturally at first, but now I use 'search' without thinking about it, and if anything it sounds weird to me when others say 'google'.

I also think if I were Google ('s lawyer, or in some appropriate/ly-senior position or whatever) I wouldn't feel great about it - it's surely quite damning in any competition law cases on search?

Thing is, google doesn't want you to really use the term google because it makes creating a trademark ever so harder.

</Fun little side fact>

I'm sure they also have concerns about it being coming over as monopolistic behavior

Good point, I didn't think about trademarking. Bing changing its button label from 'search' (or 'go' or whatever it currently is) to 'google' would be fun to watch play out!

Not to mention some search “google” in the Google search box which is there on their browser homepage but not labeled as google. They don’t trust text fields unless it’s in google website’s environment.

Makes me wonder if google might be the most searched term on google as well. I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Facebook was more searched, but not any longer. Probably is some other term still more searched on Google.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

If you type 'google' into Google, you will break the internet!!!

If I'm not using bookmark, I'm using the same approach. Because of simple reason: If I would make a typo, Google will correct it and I will not land in a some faecbook.com.

I also don't have to try to remember whether or not Widgeco's Sweden site is widgeco.se, se.widgeco.com or widgeco.com/se.