what do you do about googles ‘omnibar’? its the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes, and there is absolutely no way to turn it off.
oh yeah, one way: firefox.
its still triggers me to this day as the last straw for me and google
Firefox has omnibox and it’s not as easy to turn off as you think. The immediately available settings do some things like add the “search” box back but the “URL” box still functions as the omnibox. Have to play around with about:config and even then I haven’t figured out how to change it turn back time to the before times.
FYI, the magic about:config key that you need to set to false is “keyword.enabled”. After that Firefox will finally stop using any non-url string as a search query and will instead say say “Hmm. That address doesn’t look right. Please check that the URL is correct and try again.”
omnibox is one of the biggest QOL improvements browsers ever got IMO. Frees up screen real estate and is very intuitive. If you don’t want to navigate to your domain-like search string just add a space and a comma or something similar.
the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes
From a UX perspective, those are both ways to start a navigation to a new page, and it’s almost always clear from context which is intended (is the string formatted as a URL? Treat it as such. Otherwise, treat it as a search string). The only hiccup is when actually searching for strings that look like a URL (no whitespace, includes periods), but that happens rarely enough that I’m perfectly happy to manually go to a search engine for those cases. Otherwise, Cmd+L-“type my thoughts”-Enter works smoothly for me in both cases (on Firefox for personal laptop, or Chrome for work one).
What are the issues that you experience with this combined flow?
the worst for this is any browser for Android tv. most of the reason I’m using a browser on the Android TV is because I’m doing something sketchy that’s going to have a weird URL ending, so pretty much 100% of the time it interprets my URLs as searches
I see people put fqdns into search engines all the time.
Stop searching for things like “espn.com”, just put it in the address bar.
My old boss would type google.com into the chrome search box (not the address bar) then click the link for Google, and search for Gmail.com.
My wife works full time remote and had to have IT take over her computer and she watched him type google into the search bar.
what do you do about googles ‘omnibar’? its the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes, and there is absolutely no way to turn it off.
oh yeah, one way: firefox.
its still triggers me to this day as the last straw for me and google
Firefox has omnibox and it’s not as easy to turn off as you think. The immediately available settings do some things like add the “search” box back but the “URL” box still functions as the omnibox. Have to play around with about:config and even then I haven’t figured out how to change it turn back time to the before times.
I have never had firefox mistake a url for a search, though.
I have plenty of times, which is why I went hunting for a way to disable it.
FYI, the magic about:config key that you need to set to false is “keyword.enabled”. After that Firefox will finally stop using any non-url string as a search query and will instead say say “Hmm. That address doesn’t look right. Please check that the URL is correct and try again.”
Thanks!
huh. did you remember to feed the fox all the cookies websites give you? that normally keeps her happy.
Begrudgingly yes.
I’m out of ideas. Best to bury your computer in the back yard.
Settings -> Search -> Add search bar in toolbar?
Yes that is the setting to turn on the “search bar” but it doesn’t revert omnibar to only URLs.
omnibox is one of the biggest QOL improvements browsers ever got IMO. Frees up screen real estate and is very intuitive. If you don’t want to navigate to your domain-like search string just add a space and a comma or something similar.
From a UX perspective, those are both ways to start a navigation to a new page, and it’s almost always clear from context which is intended (is the string formatted as a URL? Treat it as such. Otherwise, treat it as a search string). The only hiccup is when actually searching for strings that look like a URL (no whitespace, includes periods), but that happens rarely enough that I’m perfectly happy to manually go to a search engine for those cases. Otherwise, Cmd+L-“type my thoughts”-Enter works smoothly for me in both cases (on Firefox for personal laptop, or Chrome for work one).
What are the issues that you experience with this combined flow?
the worst for this is any browser for Android tv. most of the reason I’m using a browser on the Android TV is because I’m doing something sketchy that’s going to have a weird URL ending, so pretty much 100% of the time it interprets my URLs as searches
Would you believe that there is some browser malware that breaks this and makes you actually have to go to a Google search to get to a website?