[HN Gopher] The largest money-printing UI element ever made
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The largest money-printing UI element ever made
Author : saeedesmaili
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-12-17 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jim-nielsen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jim-nielsen.com)
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| Who was the one with the original idea to make the url bar double
| as a search bar (I mean person, not company - i assume the first
| company to do it was google?)
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| https://www.jcchouinard.com/google-omnibox/
| ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
| I don't have a source to cite, but I remember this being a
| Firefox extension before Chrome existed. Chrome gave it a
| cool name though
| threeseed wrote:
| Apple changed it back in 2013. Not sure who invented it though.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130607000755/http://apple.com/...
| M4v3R wrote:
| The first time I saw it was in Google Chrome way back when
| Firefox still had more traction. Back then both Firefox and
| Internet Explorer had separate url and search fields.
| malodyets wrote:
| What features or benefits would a small fraction of people love
| in an alt browser?
|
| What would HN folk love in a browser?
| xrd wrote:
| Lots of HN people are fascinated by Arc. That's a good place to
| start looking.
| grishka wrote:
| > What would HN folk love in a browser?
|
| A setting to completely disable support for media elements per-
| origin would be nice. Not this "we try to determine whether a
| video is eligible for autoplaying" bullshit. I want an "I
| wasn't asking" approach of the browser literally treating
| <video> and <audio> as unknown tags when this setting is off.
|
| Native support for Flash via Ruffle would also be nice.
|
| If it's a mobile browser, I really, REALLY want a setting to
| just completely annihilate all the PWA stuff. No, I don't want
| to add this random news website to my home screen, thank you
| very much.
|
| More broadly, I want most of the "progress" of the web platform
| undone. Sure, new CSS features, like flexbox and grid, are
| nice. But all those new JS APIs that (try to) turn a _hypertext
| document viewer_ into a (terrible) operating system? No thanks.
| I want my clear boundary between the "document" and the
| "application" back, hence the Flash thing.
| imron wrote:
| Being able to browse the web and not have pages render
| incorrectly, slowly or not at all is the big one.
| aeternum wrote:
| Mouse gestures, opera had these back in the day. The right-left
| click to go back, ability to close a tab from anywhere on the
| page with just a single hand, etc.
|
| Maybe it's no longer possible due to all the click hijacking
| introduced by web2.
| gear54rus wrote:
| you still have this on keyboard with 1 hand tho
| grishka wrote:
| Ah, the joy of getting search results instead of an error when
| you mistype a domain name. Or better yet, being forced to type
| http:// when you want to navigate to a custom hostname. This
| combination address bar and search input must be stupidest UI
| element ever made. Thankfully at least Vivaldi allows turning
| this behavior off.
| gleenn wrote:
| Pretty sure you can disable it in Firefox unless they removed
| this since last I checked.
| stevage wrote:
| Personally I love it. Yes, it has the edge cases you describe
| but they are easily managed. More often I have the opposite
| problem when I want to search for a tech that has a dot in its
| name.
| kwerk wrote:
| The one I've seen lately is when I type a correct domain, but
| the autocomplete appends " login" so I get taken to a search
| result with links that are not what I wanted!
| serf wrote:
| another brain-dead 'feature' of all this is automatic URL
| parsing of search queries with a leading/trailing slash or
| colon.
|
| it's a victim of "all the ways for all the people", and it
| can't do either very well.
|
| The optimal middle ground for me was the separation between
| search query bar and URL bar.
|
| And why did we combine the two? Well, it was to reduce screen
| clutter and combine features so that we could make room for....
|
| making the URL bar longer, generally far longer than any
| sensibly human-readable URL. Brilliant!
|
| (the REAL reason was because Chrome wanted to shovel people
| into Google Search as promptly as possible, and that started a
| Stupid Browser Trend that firefox got suckered into following.)
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Does "ad" not count as a UI element?
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > make a kick-ass browser that people love, strive for even
| 0.5-1% of browser market share, and then sell your default search
| preference.
|
| Well this seems like the hard part. I think it is actually not
| easy to get 1% market share, because if you are good enough to
| hit 1% you are likely to overshoot 1% by a lot, and if you aren't
| good enough to make it past 1% you probably won't make it to 1%.
| And obviously creating a browser that is good enough to overshoot
| 1% by a lot is very difficult.
|
| The companies who actually have 1% of a market (for a sustained
| period of time) are like really weird edge cases.
| woleium wrote:
| yes, very hard, especially now with search loosing market share
| to genai
| yedava wrote:
| What are we, as a civilization, losing when we let these
| surveillance companies dictate how technology is used?
| Increasingly every aspect of our digital lives is being
| controlled by the need to sell ads.
| sam_goody wrote:
| By putting the search into the URL, Chrome is able to track every
| page you go to (since the URL is perhaps a search term) and how
| long you stay there, and what page you go to from each page you
| visit.
|
| With search suggestions on (the default), they get that even for
| FF users.
|
| Not only that, but every GET argument on every page is sent to
| Google as well, since they are perhaps search terms - so as you
| type your content is being sent; You can imagine the value even
| BEFORE getting to the fact that it generates more searches.
|
| Which is a shame, since I used to use the URL bar to search my
| browsing history and the Search bar to search the net, and the
| whole UI was so much improved, even ignoring all the times I
| accidentally am sent to a search results page I didn't want.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| > make a kick-ass browser that people love, strive for even
| 0.5-1% of browser market share, and then sell your default search
| preference
|
| Isn't this what Opera (3% marketshare) and Vivaldi (unknown%
| since they use Chrome's user-agent) are doing? And yet to make a
| browser that's good enough to capture this "small" chunk of
| market share, Opera needs >600 employees, and Vivaldi >50.
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