Ben Goodger, who previously worked on Firefox, is the technical lead for Chrome's user interface. He talked about Chrome's Omnibox, a field into which people can type either search terms or Web site addresses. For a time it was called the Psychic Omnibox internally because Google wanted it to anticipate automatically what to do.
With two boxes, as in Firefox, "it's easy to confuse the two. As a user, you had to decide what it was you wanted to do before you were going to do it. What if we were going to create one box that was always the right place to type, and it would generate good results? We smashed the two together."
Photo by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks
Caption by Stephen Shankland
