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Re:Firefox 28 Release Notes by bzbarsky on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @01:04PM (#7423209)
There is, yes.

You have three somewhat simple options for the search/url thing:

1) Have a single box, do not offer search suggestions. 2) Have a single box, offer search suggestions for the stuff users type in it. 3) Have separate boxes; offer search suggestions for the stuff typed in the search box but not the stuff typed in the url box.

#2 involves sending everything the user types in the url bar to the search suggestion provider to check for suggestions

Firefox does #3, because #2 is not considered acceptable from a user privacy perspective.

There are probably more complicated options here like only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL or something that might protect user privacy better than a straight up #2. But it gets easy to screw it up and leak private user data to the search provider....

Re:Firefox 28 Release Notes by aestra on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @01:37PM (#7423504)
>only offering search suggestions if the string typed so far doesn't look like a URL

How would this work? Lets say I wanted to search for Wikipedia, perhaps because I know there's news about it. How would Firefox know I was going to type "Wikipedia" and not "Wikipedia.com"?

Re:Firefox 28 Release Notes by bzbarsky on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @01:46PM (#7423579)
Yes, it's things like that that make this approach complicated and failure-prone. Which is why Firefox is not doing it.
Re:Firefox 28 Release Notes by ajanuary on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @01:34PM (#7423478)
Another option is to prefix searches. If I type "google " then start offering search suggestions. Chrome even has this, and a nice UX for it. It just unfortunately also has unprefixed searching.
Re:Firefox 28 Release Notes by marcosdumay on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @02:59PM (#7424154)
We can also make it bash compatible, and have all the GNU tools available at the address bar... (find www.wikipedia.com --title GNU)... But I don't think most people will be able to use it.