Friday, July 24, 2009

Inline Autocompletion

Inline autocompletion is a common part of search bars, but for the longest time, autocompletion was anchored to the beginning of the URL in a web browser address bar. In the middle of last year, Firefox included an "awesome bar" in version 3, which allowed us to type: "lunar" to bring up a past history or bookmark of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbral_lunar_eclipse", whereas other browsers required typing, "en.wiki..." (not even flexible enough to allow "wikipedia" to yield results). Over a year onward, and this still hasn't spread to other browsers.

Inline autocompletion


Firefox: en.wikipedia...
Firefox: wikipedia...
Firefox: lunar

Anchored autocompletion


Firefox: en.wikipedia...
Firefox: wikipedia...
Firefox: lunar...

Seeing as most web browsers haven't integrated their search and URL bars entirely as Chrome has, this is one handicap of most browsers that maintain discreet address bars, as they miss out on one of the top usability benefits of unanchored autocompletion - lessening the requirement on the user to remember URLs.

No comments: