When Google first unveiled the Chrome browser back in 2008, they ushered in one of the greatest innovations in consolidation ever: they merged the location bar with the search bar.
It might seem like a subtle tweak, but in actuality, with one fell swoop, Chrome had changed the way advanced users looked at the location bar. We used to view it as distinct from search, but that’s not the way 99% of all users think of it. Instead, for most users, search is the same as the address bar: the vast majority of users who access Facebook, for example, do so by searching for Facebook, not typing Facebook.com into their browser’s address bar. Google was the first company to realize that the delineation of address from search was not only unnecessary, but completely antithetical to the way the vast majority of people use their browser.
To be honest, Google’s merged address and search bar (coupled with user-definable search terms) is such a brilliant feature that I find any browser that doesn’t embrace it to be completely backwards. But I digress. Google’s now announced that they are toying with the idea of redefining the browser address bar in Chrome yet again, which — given Google’s history radically changing the address bar — is enough to catch my interest.
What Google intends on doing, though, is not change the functionality of the address bar. Instead, Google’s thinking about eliminating it entirely, either by replacing it with something less intrusive or by simply hiding it when it’s not being hovered over. [
Geek]
