A nexus market tor address in the browser bar

The address bar of tor browser is the surface the string sits on for the shortest amount of time. It appears when the reader pastes or types it and disappears the moment the reader hits enter. Between those two events every character in the bar has one job.

What it is

The address bar is a text input at the top of the browser. The reader either types characters into it, pastes a string into it, or picks a suggestion from a dropdown. The bar reports what it holds back to the browser core when the reader hits enter, and the browser opens a request to the address the bar reported.

Every path in this site ends at the bar. A reader who read the string off a notebook types it in. A reader who scanned a QR pastes the decoded text in. A reader who opened a bookmark landed on the page by the bar being set to the bookmark address. The bar is the last surface before the request.

Lifeline

What the bar keeps

• The exact string until the reader hits enter, because the bar is a text buffer and any character in it stays there until the reader edits it or the browser navigates.
• The rendering of the string in a monospace or near monospace font on most builds of the browser, which makes uppercase and lowercase easier to tell apart.
• The chance to inspect the string before the request, because the bar sits still and the reader can move a caret through it one character at a time.
• The origin of the string in the sense that the browser can show whether the string was pasted, typed, or picked from a suggestion.

What the bar loses

• The persistence, because the bar is cleared the moment the browser navigates and only the browser history holds the string after that.
• The safety of a mistyped character, because the bar has no ruler and no autocorrect to catch a character in the wrong alphabet.
• The chance to see hidden bytes, because the bar collapses a trailing space or a non breaking space into empty rendering and does not flag either.
• The link to how the reader arrived at the string, because the bar accepts a paste from a chat, a note or a screenshot OCR without knowing where any of them came from.

What autocomplete does

A browser bar with history offers suggestions as the reader types. A reader who typed nexus once may see a suggestion that looks like the address but is the address the reader typed a week ago. If the address on the site has rotated since, the suggestion is a stale string and the reader who accepts the suggestion is opening the stale string.

Some readers turn suggestions off for this reason. Some readers rely on suggestions because they save typing. The bar does not know which the reader wants and defaults to whatever the browser was set to on install. A dossier on this surface does not choose. It notes that a suggestion is not the same as a fresh paste.

The moment before enter

The one useful check the bar offers is to read the string once out loud, character by character, before the enter key. This is the last chance to catch a character in the wrong alphabet, a hidden space, or a suggestion that resolved to a stale entry. After enter, the string is a request and the reader has moved on to reading a response.

Engagement

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