The End of Consistency

In Safari on the Mac, single-clicking in anywhere in the location field will direct keyboard focus to the text area and place the cursor at the character boundary closest to where you clicked. This is the same behavior as every other text box in Mac OS X.

In Google Chrome, clicking text in the location field will automatically select the entire URL. Presumably this is because Google engineers feel that people are more likely to want to replace the entire URL than to edit a portion of it.¹

However, there are several scenarios where you’d be better off with Safari’s behavior: (1) there’s a typo in the URL you’d like to change; (2) you want to move up a level out of dead-end navigation by deleting everything after the last slash; (3) you want to copy only a portion of the URL, either (a) just the host portion, or (b) just the file name portion; (4) you want to append text to the end of the URL; (5) you get the idea …

Chrome’s behavior is flawed for two fundamental reasons. First, it breaks consistency with the rest of the Macintosh interface. You may not think it’d be a big deal, but it’s upsetting—often on a subconscious level—when someone expects a widget to behave a certain way and it responds slightly differently. Second, Chrome’s custom URL field favors beginner users at the expense of all others. While an application that tells a new user, “hey, I made your life easier by assuming you meant to select the entire URL,” may be helpful to the novice, it’s hostile to experts—they already know how URLs and text fields work, and their actions are usually intentional.²

The infuriating thing about the inconsistency is the conflicting responses to bug reports filed by users who found the behavior undesirable: Google has said both that the standard interface behavior is correct and we will follow suit and that the current, non-standard behavior is better. This run-around response seems typical of Google, a company that has little experience providing technical support for end users.