Yesterday I brought up the question if there could be a change to the address bar of the next version of Internet Explorer. Since I’m using Windows Vista I’m very happy with the new view of the path in explorer.exe. It is very easy to navigate to parent folders by simple clicking on the part of the name. If you click on the small arrow you’ll get a list of folders that are located in the same folder.

Using a good URL allows me to guess other URLs:

mydomain/en/products/software/office/word/default.aspx

• mydomain/en/products/software/office > might show all office products
• mydomain/en/products/software > shows an overview of all software
• mydomain/en/products > is the main page for products
• mydomain/de > maybe exists, too, the German version of the site

In Internet Explorer it could appear like this:

Maybe we need to add a new meta tag for this, could be a reference to the sitemap.xml which then gets downloaded like the favicon.

5 Comments

• vincent said Friday, July 18, 2008 11:12:13 AM

  this is a great idea! That'd be a lovely addition.

• Dominic Pettifer said Friday, July 18, 2008 11:15:06 AM

  Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this, I understand it would be good from a user point of view. But as a web developer/savy web user, I'm always chopping and changing parts of the URL manually, either during developing/testing a website, or surfing a well known site. Will there still be an option to turn this feature off? Or, just like Vista, will it turn into a plain text string when you click at the end of it?

• Michael Schwarz said Friday, July 18, 2008 1:17:49 PM

  @Dominic: currently there is no feedback if this would be added. I had the idea yesterday at the IE chat and think it would be nice (maybe only on Windows Vista and Server 2008, on XP and 2003 it could be like today). And yes, it should work the same when you click at the end that it turns into plain text. Michael

• Eber Irigoyen said Friday, July 18, 2008 4:07:07 PM

  ah, that would be nice, it might be hard to implement the dropdown folder lists like that (can you really trust the developers?), but at least being able to each section would be nice. Maybe display the dropdown for the sections that have been visited, so that the browser doesn't depend on anything other than history

• John said Sunday, July 20, 2008 1:01:49 PM

  I would like to have this, great idea!!!