Getting rid of the location bar
So it looks like both Google and Mozilla are looking to get rid of the persistent location bar from their browsers. Google's reason for moving this way is obvious, it means people become more reliant on their core product: the search engine, but Mozilla being interested in this too means there's probably something to it.
Despite Google's agenda, I do think this is a good thing. 90% of any given URI is a waste and simply there to hook the search engines in. A few years ago it was 'good useability' to have your URI's reflect the structure of your site, now the more keywords you can fit in the better, it's kind of ridiculous.
Maybe a browser without a persistent location bar could work like this: you open the browser and it shows you the location bar, then after arriving at a site it disappears until you move from one domain to another. When you arrive at a new domain, the location bar fades in to show you where you are, then fades out again unless you want to use it. Ctrl/Cmd + L brings up the location bar with the current URI highlighted as happens now (in FF and Chrome) and when you click on a tab, the same thing happens.
People are arguing against this saying that the location bar doesn't take up that much room and provides useful information about a site, and whilst it doesn't take up that much space (on my Mac it's not even worth a mention) on my 14" laptop, it's seriously valuable vertical real estate. Making it work in the way I've described above means we're given almost as much information about a site, without the visual clutter and possible confusion a location bar can create.
As an aside, in this MozillaLabs post, David Regev suggests an alternative to browser chrome that uses "natural-language commands". I think this is a great idea, and think it's funny that we're heading back towards a command line interface. The difference is that this time around, we understand how people interact with computers a little better, we don't have to remember obscure commands, we just tell it what we want, using "natural language" and the computer does the rest.
I think this is a good thing :)
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