

The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line - alexkay
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001265.html

======
ramchip
"X is the new Y" is the new "X complements Y"

Feel free to reuse ad nauseam with Twitter, email, Google, Wolfram Alpha,
command lines, cloud computing, crowdsourcing...

------
makecheck
While I've certainly made use of typing random stuff into my web browser, the
browser can't compete with a shell until it learns to display results as
concisely.

Unix has get-results-and-get-out behavior. There's no "fluff"; some commands
won't even display an error string, they just return error status. (This is
pretty ideal, to me.)

If I must use a GUI, I find Apple's Spotlight closer to what I want, than a
browser's location bar. For example: while I _could_ ask Google to solve 2+2,
I still have a web page wrapped around the result (that probably replaces
whatever web page I was using); with Spotlight, the answer to 2+2 appears
before I even hit Return, and when I hit Esc the entire query box disappears
and I can resume what I was doing before. _That_ is how a "super location bar"
needs to work.

------
jhancock
try this in your chrome url bar: rm -rf *

I just tried it and google still seems to have quiet a bit of data.

~~~
throw_away
$ sudo !!

------
pierrefar
Actually, it's not the address bar per se, but the search box that's the
default home page on so many browsers. For many people "Google" is the
"Internet" and they type into the Google box shown by default things like
"cnn.com" and the like.

I guess Jeff's point may have been aimed at the techie crowd (a Chrome
screenshot with a JS example), and for this smaller demographic of web users,
I can't agree more.

------
lostparadise
I read it just now. Jeff Attwood is great as usual.

