I use a variety of browsers, and I have seen this behaviour with at least three of them (Edge, Chrome, Firefox)…
I don’t keep bookmarks - they’re just clutter - when I want to visit a familiar site, I just start typing the name of the site in the address bar - I usually only have to type one or two letters before it identifies the site I am after, except…
It doesn’t always go there - sometimes it just searches for the two letters I entered - it’s like this:
[ul]
[li]I want to go to this message board - I type B O[/li][li]The address bar correctly interprets my intent and displays the complete URL boards.straightdope.com (and the whole string is highligted[/li][li]I hit enter[/li][li]The browser takes me to the search results for ‘BO’ in Google or (gah!) Bing[/li][li]I kill the tab, open a new one, and repeat from start - exactly the same things happen, except this time, it takes me to the site I want[/li][/ul]
Sometimes it will do the search thing twice, and I get the site on the third attempt - sometimes it won’t do the search thing at all and I go directly to the site on the first attempt - but in all cases, there’s no difference in what I type, and no difference in the way it presents the intermediate results of my typing to me.
My guess: I think there’s a delay whilst sorting/interpreting new entries during which the list re-organises, putting a different entry under highlight. Second time around, there’s no new entries so no delay, the highlighted entry stays highlighted.
When you start typing, it starts looking through your history, but it also figures that you might not have that string in your history, so it also creates the google search. If it hasn’t found the item you’re looking for by the time you hit enter, it’s going to use the google search instead. I see that you can see the url in the search bar, so I’m guessing that it’s not using the same place in memory to display on the screen as it is to actually do the request, so it’s taking a millisecond between displaying it and moving it to the right spot to process. Maybe even a micro-second.
The difference in time might be because the url you’re looking for is now higher in the list, or it could be because you moved just a hair slower to hit the enter key the second time.
This is called a race condition in software circles and can be a right pain in the arse to debug.
You can speed up that search if it’s really slow, but I believe it means losing that dropdown history.
BTW, you don’t really have to delete that tab and open a new tab. Just clear out the search bar and start over
I gotta say, I absolutely hate how browsers have gone to searching from the address box. Entering anything that’s not a valid URL should return an error message. Even Firefox, which still has a separate search box, will do a search from the address box.