A very wise person once said:
"Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler!"
That fundamental rule of design has been volated with Internet Explorer 9.
I've been using IE9 for about a month now, trying to get used to all the new things. Performance-wise it's nice, and the changes to security are welcome. Okay, so the color-management is half baked, and it still has its problems, but I guess it's an improvement.
But what idiot decided to make the search box and the address field one and the same?
You think I'm being petty? Go try to research what a particular file is - for example, go see if you can find info on "bib.dll".
It wants to make it into a URL. It's not a URL. It may LOOK like one, but it's a name, honest!
Putting quotes around it doesn't help. Maybe I'm missing the advanced syntax it takes to get such a thing to be a search term instead of a URL. Even if so, how is this an improvement or simplification? It's certainly not intuitively obvious how to force a search, short of dredging up a link to Google and typing info in there directly.
Doing a search and typing in an address are two FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT THINGS.
And hey, it's not a big deal that you can no longer see what it was you searched for, and maybe even edit it and search again. No, because now the search engine pages have to waste space to put up a box showing what you just searched for, since it's now GONE out of the address field.
How does stuff like this pass a design review?
And to think the Microsoft Engineers worked extra hard to take it out.
You Engineers at Microsoft need to take the product back from your moronic marketing people and make it actually work right.
-Noel