This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.