I think what really governs peoples habits is whatever their browser of choice sets as the default. Unless they go out of their way to swap it themselves, which they usually don’t.
Not really a direct response to what you were saying, just sort of musing here lol
Yeah I think this might be true. There are a lot of people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to technology and just use things how they come out of the box. I always wish I could do something to help change that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember browsers ever having a default search engine back then, did they? One had to bookmark it or type it in the address bar?
Yeah, there was definitely a time where you had to navigate to a site to then do the search. I know having Google integrated right there in the address bar in chrome was something I loved when I first started using it (2009 or so maybe?) but I don’t think that was the first time I had ever encountered it. Definitely the earliest I remember.
To this day, just searching from the address bar feels wrong to me lol. I was so happy to discover that Firefox has a setting to add a dedicated search box.
I still search from the address bar on mobile, but on PC it’s always in the search box. I find it easier to switch between search engines and compare results that way as well.
There are a lot of old-school habits that are still baked into my mind.
The main thing that got me switching to Google back then wasn’t the better results, but their promise not to collect or use our data.
That all changed after 9/11, but by then Google had grown so huge it was hard to avoid them.
Even so, I still went back to Webcrawler and the others quite a lot and never really consistently used one search engine faithfully.
I think what really governs peoples habits is whatever their browser of choice sets as the default. Unless they go out of their way to swap it themselves, which they usually don’t.
Not really a direct response to what you were saying, just sort of musing here lol
Yeah I think this might be true. There are a lot of people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to technology and just use things how they come out of the box. I always wish I could do something to help change that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember browsers ever having a default search engine back then, did they? One had to bookmark it or type it in the address bar?
Yeah, there was definitely a time where you had to navigate to a site to then do the search. I know having Google integrated right there in the address bar in chrome was something I loved when I first started using it (2009 or so maybe?) but I don’t think that was the first time I had ever encountered it. Definitely the earliest I remember.
To this day, just searching from the address bar feels wrong to me lol. I was so happy to discover that Firefox has a setting to add a dedicated search box.
I still search from the address bar on mobile, but on PC it’s always in the search box. I find it easier to switch between search engines and compare results that way as well.
There are a lot of old-school habits that are still baked into my mind.
Interesting I never thought of it as a bad thing! By the way, I am not the one who downvoted you just so we’re clear lol
Maybe I should try setting that dedicated search bar as well on my Firefox and see how I like it. What do you like about it?