Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design.<p>Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both.<p>If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox&#x27;s design decision makes sense. You don&#x27;t want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you&#x27;re not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg &quot;go&#x2F;foo&quot; can be a URL internally).<p>But users don&#x27;t care about any of that. Users don&#x27;t have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome&#x27;s decision was correct. It&#x27;s surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.<p>Here&#x27;s another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is &quot;facebook&quot;. Tech-savvy people will just type &quot;facebook.com&quot; but users will just search for &quot;facebook&quot; and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.<p>So the lesson is don&#x27;t leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don&#x27;t care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.