have you noticed the browser address bar lately?

If you’re like me, and you’ve been using the web since the days when most of your friends’ sites had tildes in their URLs, you might still be thinking that the only way to get to a web address was to type everything out.

As browsers matured, they became more and more helpful. Often, a list of URLs that you had recently visited would appear in the drop-down space below the address bar.

Over years of watching the way people use browsers, I’ve noticed people have different interactions with the address bar. Some people use that browser history as their favourites list as well. Others don’t notice the addresses flashing past.

What I’d like to point out in this post is the improvements in the latest browsers. If you open up the latest Safari, Chrome (power user’s guide), Opera or even Firefox browser, you’ll see a lot of changes in the way that you can navigate to and find URLs.

The one feature that I’d like to point out from the more recent changes is that now, instead of recommending URLs based on the part of the URL you have typed in, the browser will check what you’re typing against the page titles from the history.

This means that if you’re trying to find the URL for a news article, you can start typing the title of the article, and the browser will consider all the pages you’ve visited, and try and show you pages that have a matching title.

Try it out!

Have you noticed any browser improvements lately?

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2 Comments

  1. Browsers are getting so much better and I do all my searching etc through the URL box now 🙂 I am always amazed when I watch friends who don’t spend as much time on the internet typing in the www. and finishing the whole URL! I just can’t wait until the days when you can think a URL and it will read your mind and take you there!

  2. You mean…you don’t need to type http:// anymore? Wow 😛 Even worse is when folk read all that out over the phone: h t t p : forward slash forward slash w w w

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