whats the drop down priority order in the address bar in most browsers

[mikeyb2001]

might be a better starting point for most people instead of the default
so this is more for new user familiarity

[DoctorG]

@mikeyb2001 Oh, nice question.
I thing only devs from other browsers can tell it correct. I never, did not wanted to waste my time, checked how address field works in Edge, Brave, Chromium, Firefox or WhatEverElse.
Perhaps some Multi-Browser testers and users can tell you more.

[mikeyb2001]

@Pathduck i made a new topic to help him and anyone else confused by drop down priority
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/102334/when-i-type-to-url-bar-i-just-want-to-use-search-engine?_=1729872349657

[Pathduck]

OK some pointers:

• Chrome/Chromium and most Chromium-based browsers use the Omnibox.
  https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/omnibox/
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dk_U-zXiMFynKOYYKrS6VKUXrON_ta2mYnAyHa-Uvc0/
• Vivaldi does not use Omnibox, but its own implementation allowing stuff like the drop-down menu priority and ordering/removing categories.
• Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers use a ranking based on some "Frecency" algorithm:
  https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/ranking.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frecency
• Chrome was built from the ground up as a data collection tool. It prioritized History searches over Bookmarks, as it wanted users to save their history so Google could slurp and index it.
• Google is a "search company"[1] and they made damn sure its History search was really good, so people would use it instead of Bookmarking stuff.

So is Chrome's Omnibox search better than Vivaldi's implementation?
It depends. The Omnibox does not allow for any customization of results or priorities - it uses algorithms to guess what the user wants. And it's pretty good at guessing, that's true.

For people who rely solely on their History to find web pages, the Omnibox is great, probably better than Vivaldi. But I've not used Chrome to any large extent so wouldn't be able to tell. Most people coming from other browsers will be used to the Omnibox and so that's what they expect. They'll just have to learn the Vivaldi way.

[1] Google is actually a data collection and advertising company but that's another discussion.