I've had a look at Google's docs[1], and it's really not clear to me what Chrome's omnibox offers that Firefox's address bar (or whatever they call it) doesn't.
I've got Aurora installed for Tor and flash-based apps that don't play nicely with Chrome, but I still use Chrome for my daily surfing and so have not really noticed any of the changes Mozilla has made. If the address bar really is reproducing the functionality of the omnibox, why not kill the search box all together? It seems like duplicated functionality and a waste of screen real estate.
I think the only use for the search box now is to give people easy access to multiple (or a secondary) search engine. Sure, it's ugly, but it does give users a clear and simple way to search wikipedia for "widgets".
Chrome, on the other hand, only exposes non-Google search engines through the search engine keyword thingy, which means a user has to actually type "en.wikipedia.org widgets" into the omnibox. Sure, tab-completion will do half the work, but the user still has to remember to start typing "en." rather than, say, "wikipedia".
I know that Chrome (and, indeed, Firefox) allow you to edit those search engine keywords, but that is power-user territory, and power-users can edit their Firefox UI as well. http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png
Minor quibble, but Chrome makes it pretty easy to change your default search engine to anything you want, including non-Google search engines. It's not that you need to use a keyword to search a non-Google search engine, it's that you need to use a keyword to search a non-default search engine. :)
Also, the UI in Firefox for changing the address bar search engine is awful -- about:config, click through the warning, then find and edit keyword.URL (which is in a different format to everything else)
Some of us actually like distinguishing between URLs/bookmarks/history and an autocomplete-with-search-engine-spying search facility. I don't view the trend of combining them into a single text box as a positive one, whichever browser is doing it.
Regular consumers really don't care about version numbers. They probably don't even know which version of Office they have installed, let alone their web browser.
But why did the terminal choose those keys? Most games have chosen an up-down combo that are up-down from each other, rather than right-left.
The thing about ASCII Control characters doesn't quite map to left-up-down-right, and even if it were part of the answer, we could ask again: why were those characters chosen for those control-roles?
And the reason they didn't was that they evolved from typewriters that relied on a forward/backward spin to move up and down (except for the carriage return lever). We're lucky that the original terminals didn't have a scroll knob on the left and right of the machine to move up and down and a lever to move to the next line or we would have been stuck with that concept for years and the laptop may not have been invented because the knobs and lever would have required some elevation, which means the whole thing would have had to have been bigger.
I used a scroll knob to move up and down (and left and right) on my Blackberry in 2000, and it was awesome. It's dramatically better than using arrow keys. It's a real shame the original CRT terminals didn't have scroll knobs. It would have dramatically improved the usability of computers throughout the 1970s and 80s.
They even admit it's not just governments they sell to: VUPEN customers include worldwide governments and major corporations in finance, technology and manufacturing. [http://www.vupen.com/english/company.php] although their continued use of weasel words does stop just short of admitting that they're enabling industrial espionage.
VUPEN's offensive IT intrusion solutions and government grade exploits enable the Intelligence community and government agencies to achieve their lawful intercept missions using VUPEN's industry-recognized vulnerability research and intelligence.
I am trying to imagine a situation where _lawfuly_ government agencies need to break into someones IE. Any ideas?
hmmm.. I think law enforcement agencies need to stay in accordance with the law even with their "discovery". Breaking into someone's IE or exploiting vulnerabilities in order to get information otherwise you wouldn't be able to get falls under breaking into someones "property", I think, even if its "just" an Internet browser.
Therefore, you "legitimate" search warrant will be thrown out of window by a judge, and classified as the Fruit of the poisonous tree.
For historical reasons (viz. NSS), Mozilla maintains its own list of trusted CAs. Chrome uses whatever is provided by the OS, so they aren't in a position to make the same sorts of demands.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment -- there's just a very specific reason why Mozilla is involved, and it's not simply because they write a web browser.
Chrome already has a mechanism to detect a MITM for Google's servers by embedding those servers' public keys into Chrome itself.
Of course, that doesn't stop a company from placing locally-trusted rogue certificates on computers they control, overriding Chromes public-key pinning check. But it means that they can't MITM a connection from your personal laptop when you're on their network.
Search engines certainly should interpret it that way, but I think the point was to question whether they all (for someone value of "all") really do do it that way in practice.
Huh. ssh used to offer this feature natively -- just symlink any hostname to the ssh binary -- but it turns out that they removed this about ten years ago.
http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...