I use the browser’s address bar several times a day but I never thought deeply about its design. It is after all a simple text input bar. But is it that simple?
Google Chrome calls it the omnibox. And it is designed with a specific UX philosophy: reduce cognitive overhead. In other words, reduce the number of decisions needed to be made to go to a certain page.
The primary outcome of this philosophy is combining the search and address bar. In the past, these two boxes were separated.
However, by combining them it's one less decision a user has to make. Omnibox's entire goal is to bounce the user to their destination as soon as possible similar to a Google search page.
As an aside, reducing decision-making is one-way apps are made more addictive. For example, paginations buttons at the end of a page are changed to infinite scrolling so there is no discreet stopping point and a conscious decision to go to the next page is not necessary.
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