Reading through yours and the other comments here...I just can't even understand...who came up with the idea of changing key word searches into autocompleting URLs? Personally, I still find the idea of a URL bar doubling as a search bar a bit disconcerting as it is. I expect specific behaviour from a URL bar. I type in an address and either it takes me to what I type or it can't find it.
This behaviour everyone's describing from safari would fill me with so much rage. That shit would drive me nuts. Having non existent addresses being interpreted as search queries is annoying enough, if my browser started deciding my searches were random web addresses I'd lose my shit.
TBH I quite like it, especially in chrome. I can type "GitHub [project name] pulls" and it will take me where I want to go, I can type "app.dev myfeature" and it will go suggest "app.dev.company.com/some/deep/path-abcd1234/myfeature"
The difference is how it's visualized. On Chrome, it shows you the complete path. If I type "gi" in omnibox, I can visually see "github.com/EhsanKia" and then I press enter.
In the video shown above, you visually SEE "realty.comm" (there's an extra m there which I found very strange, which makes me think this is a bug), but when the person pressed enter, it goes to realtor.com. I expect pressing enter to run the query I see, not for it to change after I press enter.
Meanwhile in Chrome for me I type my project manager’s name to bring up their WebEx link I visit several times a day and it comes up but first I have to move my mouse down past several autocomplete suggestions for travel destinations and popular musicians.
Sure that's great, but that should either be separate from the address bar or at the very least shouldn't be so 'default' for lack of a better term, that just clicking without thinking activates that behaviour. For people like yourself that use it to its full advantage I won't argue that is a good feature. For the majority of people trying to make a simple search, it doesn't seem so helpful.
I feel like default behaviour should be broadly helpful, while specifically helpful behaviour should be easily accessible but not so easily accessible that a mindless click triggers it.
On my Firefox 79, if I pop open a new tab, 1) the cursor is refocused from the search box to the URL bar and 2) the URL bar is a search box (even if search-in-url-box is successfully disabled in not-new tabs).
Even better, the option to set new tab to a webpage is gone. The only choices are the Firefox default page or a blank webpage.
Normally this wouldn't be a problem. I'd just try one of the dozen of known tweaks to about:config or userChrome.css and defeat this behavior. Except none of them impact this.
FWIW, and as a workaround and not any sort of defense of FF breaking itself: You could, from an existing page, type what you want in the search box, then middle-click (or ctrl+click) the search button, which opens the result in a new tab. Again, you shouldn't have to do this, but it seems like it'd patch your workflow.
In the end I opted for an extension - it redirects a new tab to a web page of my choosing.
The action is a bit distracting but it happens fast enough that it's not a bother.
I'll note it was the 2nd extension I tried. It may be some onerous Firefox security measure needs to be bypassed & the first extension hadn't managed it yet.
The point here is to be able to offer suggestion without leaking search intent / keywords to a search engine that happens to use it for ad profiling.
But the way Apple is doing it is an uphill battle because without much context, it's harder to offer an anonymized solution. I remain hopeful it's just a buggy implementation and that they don't give up because I really like the model from a privacy perspective.
This behaviour everyone's describing from safari would fill me with so much rage. That shit would drive me nuts. Having non existent addresses being interpreted as search queries is annoying enough, if my browser started deciding my searches were random web addresses I'd lose my shit.