I agree with your thoughts on the 2 bars being wasteful, but we shouldn't abandon the url bar entirely. Sure give it double function (search and direct url), but eliminating it entirely seems like jumping the gun.

this seems like a conniving way to drive more traffic to google.com so people like my parents will then type in the urls they already know into google's search box

If you type a couple words into the Safari URL bar, you are likely to get an error page. Type those into the Chrome bar, you get a search for the terms. Type a real URL into either one, and you go there. Which is preferable, a search or an error page? It's not conniving, it's convenient.

I use Firefox, I love the two search bars. ctrl+L to get navigation, ctrl+K to get search. ctrl+up/down to change which site I want to search, which saves me a good chunk of time in the long run. I'm not opposed to hiding them though, as long as they're still there and show up when I type my keyboard commands. I don't think the https issue is too hard to work around either: just show a lock next to the tab's icon.

I share your frustration (wrong word for such a minor discomfort, but anyway) with the two fields in Safari, and I'm often asking myself why Apple hasn't combined them.

I can think of two reasons:

For beginners having 'address is the square box on the left and search is the rounded box on the right' is the sort of simplification Apple likes to bake into their products.

The other is 'The bit of the internet you are looking at is in the square box, and the 3rd party app for search called Google is over there in that rounded box (where it should stay)'.

Both make sense to me if I put on my Apple mindreader hat... although I may be being a bit too cynical with my second reason.

Don't you people know why it is 2 fields ? One to send to the search engine provider and one to NOT send to the searchengine provider if you know exactly where you are going. That is why Mozilla didn't combine them and that is why Google did.

At the risk of sounding a bit snarky, don't you know what an execute command is?

Type a search string into a 'universal' field and hit enter = perform a search.

Type a URL into a 'universal' field and hit enter = go to that URL.

Use some refined heuristics to determine the intention (ala the AwesomeBar in Firefox) and you've got the best of both worlds.

I don't use Firefox/Chrome daily, so I may be missing something, but I don't see why a dual address/search field needs to communicate with Google to be combined.

A large part of the reason Firefox chose to keep them separate is for privacy. Everything you type into the search bar is sent to Google--even before you hit enter--for autocomplete purposes. The Firefox team felt that many privacy-conscious users trusted that the URL bar doesn't send info until they hit enter.

Do you know what discoverability is ? Really how do users know ? It has to be obvious or users won't use it/understand or even discover it.

It doesn't have to go to the search engine provider if it's combined. Just regexp match a URL, and if it's a URL, go right there.

With autocompletion it will send every part while you type to the search-engine: p, po, por, porn, porns, pornsi, pornsit, pornsite, pornsite., pornsite.c ohhh, the user meant a URL, I'll stop sending it to the searchengine provider.

Opera allows you to search from the URL bar, and customize these searches. By default, you can type "w foo" to search wikipedia, "g bar" to search Google, etc. You can also very easily remove the search bar, which is separate by default.

"Quicksearches" in Firefox work exactly like that, too.

I agree that it's nice to have the URL bar double as the search bar. I've been patiently waiting for Apple to combine them in Safari so I don't have to remember two very different keyboard commands for getting to them.

Safari could also use the Chrome-style status bar overlay.