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's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. URLs and search bars are just different. There are also corner cases where you're not sure if something is a URL or a search term, mostly to do with intranets (eg "go/foo" can be a URL internally).<p>But users don't care about any of that. Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL. Chrome's decision was correct. It's surprising how long Firefox stuck with their bad (IMHO) design.<p>Here's another example of this: IIRC one of the most frequently searched terms on Google is "facebook". Tech-savvy people will just type "facebook.com" but users will just search for "facebook" and click on the (hopefully) first result. That happens a ton.<p>So the lesson is don't leak technical and implementation details into interface design. Your users don't care about any of that. Think like a user, not an engineer.