Chrome’s new experiment makes huge changes to Omnibox Autocomplete

Google is currently conducting an experiment named “Omnibox Rich Autocompletion” in Chrome with the aim to autocomplete suggestion even if the input is part of the title or not a hostname prefix. Generally, the prefix of the URL will be autocompleted.

The combined address bar and search bar in Chrome, known as Omnibox, allows us to visit websites and perform searches. It also shows rich entity suggestions and answers to your queries and can be used as a calculator also.

As of now, when you type prefix of a URL, Chrome Omnibox will autocomplete it, but it doesn’t autocomplete the suggestion when you leave the beginning of URL or include parts of the title, this is something Chromium team now wants to address.

omnibox with two line UI autocompleting title for input — Omnibox autocompleting the title -two line UI

When the user remembers only part of URL than the prefix then it conflicts with the “Omnibox’s goal of helping users navigate to desired destinations” Google engineer Manukh argues in the design document of Rich Omnibox Autocompletion.

Generally, URLs can be larger than the title and hard to remember. With the current Omnibox design that autocompletes URL prefixes, non autocompleted suggestions will be shown at the bottom, making it to hard to select or user need to use the mouse to select it.

With the new experiment, Chrome will autocomplete the prefix and non-prefix of the title and prefix and non-prefix of the URL in Omnibox.

With the autocomplete variations currently available, you’ll see two lines for input in Omnibox where the title and URL will be shown.

The feature can be tested on all channels including stable by enabling “Omnibox Autocomplete Titles” flag, but you should be using Canary as it contains following additional flags