Features
For websites which use favicons (a small icon that represents the website), there will also be a small icon in the address bar. The address bar is used in some web browsers to indicate the security status of the web page. Various colors and padlock icons show if the page is encrypted and how trustworthy the communication is.
In Opera, the address bar can double as a progress bar that indicates how much of the content of the page has been loaded. This feature was first introduced with Safari, but current versions of the browser no longer exhibit this behavior.
Some browsers' address bars can also be used to detect web feeds that can be used to subscribe to pages. Normally indicated by the RSS icon "". A a universal edit button "" with an extension for the Mozilla Firefox for editable homepages, e.g. wikis.
In Google Chrome, the address bar (or Omnibox) doubles as a search plugin bar which pulls incremental returns for typed phrases or letter combinations from Google Suggest's pre-emptive search. A Firefox addon which duplicates this functionality is available.
Quick searches can, in some browsers, be done by entering the search terms instead of an address. Further a feature known as "keywords" can be used to search specific sites or to quickly get to a bookmarked page. For example with the keyword "w" associated with the Wikipedia search-box you could quickly find an article about cake by entering "w cake" as the address.
Read more about this topic: Address Bar
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)