Apple has just announced Mountain Lion
, the next update for the Mac operating system. As I was looking through the screenshots from developers who got to try the preview, I noticed one interesting change in Safari: the address bar is now unified with the search bar, just like Chrome.
This was one feature that made Chrome more usable for me compared to Safari. Firefox also has the ability to use the address bar to search, though it’s not the default state (and yes, IE and Opera have this too). This unified search/address bar has worked very well in Chrome, and I’m surprised all other browsers haven’t adopted this already as the default.
For now, if you’re using Safari and want the unified bar you can use the Omnibar
plugin. I use it and it works fine for the most part.
