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I have noticed that Firefox is using two search bars in new tab - address bar and additional search bar on the start page. Is there an actual purpose of doing that in web UI/UX (maybe because people are used to google search bar) or is it just a way of filling up the empty space?

I never used the second search bar since I started using this browser.

Screenshot:

enter image description here

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  • Personally, as a power user I hated it when Chrome introduced the search bar on the new tab page. They diminished the frequent pages thumbnails (a feature I heavily used) to replicate one I already had.
    – Wes Toleman
    Feb 24, 2018 at 11:35

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From what I'm aware, it's to help less proficient users do searches.

The browser address bar has been merged from just being for typing in URLs to also searching. For regular users this makes sense.

But for many people the only place they search is in the middle of the page (see the regular search home pages below).

I have witnessed people that are much more comfortable just typing their search into the search box in the middle of the firefox default tab. Mostly for them the address bar is something they'd almost never touch. If they want to go to a website e.g. ebay.com they will do a search for 'ebay' and then click the top link.

Google

Bing

Yahoo

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