I don't know if this is intentional or Google is paying Mozilla but i don't understand why Firefox makes it confusing to do exactly what it is made to do. The home page of firefox has an address bar on the top and a search box in the middle of the page. Most people just go straight to the search box not knowing it is not the address bar. That makes most traffic go to the search engines first. I don't know if anyone have noticed this but this kind of gives the search engines an undue advantage over website owners.

The search box should be made to detect if the user has entered a valid URL and forwards to the URL or if the user enters a wrong URL, the browser can now send them to a search engine. That thing confuses most users. As a website admin, I just see that most of the traffic to our websites come from search engines and when you look at the keywords the user used, you find out that they actually typed the correct address. Why do you have to send a user to google even when they have the correct address? That gives the search engine the priviledge of showing similar website or advertising to the user. I believe this would have effect on website owners.

Google chrome got this right, they have a devised a means to only usse the search engine when an invalid url is entered or when the URL is not available for some reasons.

Firefox needs to check this. They have no reason to put a pick search box on their default home page when its apparent that this could confuse users.

 

Categories:

Share

Comments