And while they are at it, put the dang refresh button back in the url bar. I have never used the speech input button to enter a url into the field. One tap becomes two taps to do something as common as refreshing the page.
The funny thing is that I don't use any of the buttons in the browser. I use the URL bar to tell the browser what to show me. Cmd-T for new tap, then Cmd-opt-arrows to view the various things I've asked the browser to show me. Cmd-R for a refresh. Don't need a button for that. Multi-finger swipes for back/forward. My home is set to a blank page, so it's a useless button for me. Seems to me like a simple UI could be had. Got no opions on mobile. Don't use it enough to know what that experience is like. No get off my lawn!!
It's easier to direct them to it because it always has the same prompt text. "Do you see a box that says 'Search Google or type URL?'? Great, type this into it..."
The thing that's harder is getting them to read the url back to you.
So, as you type into the bar, it adds what you're typing to the URL. And this is fine. But what isn't fine, is that the way they did this adds to your page history... for each and every character.
So, when I type "Things", and then decide to back out back to HN, I have to press back seven times.
"It now takes something like 4 taps to get to the point where I can correct or otherwise edit the URL in my mobile browser (Safari)"
Just FYI, you can touch once in the URL bar to set focus to it (the whole URL will be selected), then touch and hold down on the keyboard (which will then act like a desktop touchpad) to move the cursor around to edit the URL.
I find this handy, though it took me a while to get used to it.
This is just my opinion :) but, clicking in the address bar in order to type a URL seems pretty inefficient. Why not activate the address bar with the keyboard, which you will need to use to type the URL anyway?
It's similar to typing a URL in the address bar and instead of typing Enter to navigate, you grab the mouse and click the little 'go' arrow on the right.
Nope, they actually thought about that. When you click on the url box the selection isn't replaced. So you can totally select an URL elsewhere, click on URL bar, press backspace to clear the bar, and middle-click-paste the selection.
On the other hand selecting the text in the URL bar in any other way (with mouse drag, triple click, or keyboard) will update the selection.
What's the argument for showing it all the time? There's not enough space to show the entirety of even relatively short URLs without scrolling (and scrolling means tapping on it anyway).
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