Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

androidpolice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 733 posts

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#92

Post by hombre_fatal »

simonkafan wrote: post #27

Isn't this a good example of "feature creep"? I dont see any reason why it makes a browser more useful when the URL is partially hidden. It reminds me of a company which developed a product which was more or less done. So the SWE manager and the product manager made up new (pretty useless) features just to tell their bosses the devs are busy and the team must stay intact.

To try and think of an upside for the user, it might help people detect phishing by making the domain name more prominent.

I've seen phishing sites like support.google.com.8n.cn where the right side (the most important) just disappears into the /path. Though this attack is even more brilliant on mobile devices that truncate the right hand side and leave with you with "support.google.com...".

Aside, I encourage fellow HNers to purposely visit seedy websites in a VM without an ad blocker. Especially if you haven't been exposed to crappy behavior since the popup/under days. Great way to see the state of hostile web practices, like unblockable popups and fake macOS notifications.

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#94

Post by cletus »

Another phrase I live by: "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

There will be some VP of Product or Engineering buried deep in the bureaucracy who is pushing this, deciding with no evidence (or, worse, lots of evidence to the contrary; believe me this happens) that it is the "users who are wrong" [1].

It now takes something like 4 taps to get to the point where I can correct or otherwise edit the URL in my mobile browser (Safari) as I have to go through different layers where someone, somewhere has decided I can't possibly mean to edit the URL so I must be wanting to select the entire thing.

I'm sure this same "it's the users who are wrong" from a handful of key stakeholders that is pushing AMP. And for something that supposedly improves the mobile experience, it doesn't fit on my iPhone 11 screen and it's also disabled zoom. This is probably because I've changed the default zoom, something that gives me no end of problems but I can't control how bad my eyesight is and I don't need a company telling me I'm wrong for wanting to zoom. There is never an excuse to disable zoom on a browser and browser makers should remove the ability for sites to do this, period.

I used to love the simplicity and features of Chrome. I once relied a great deal on Chrome Sync. For years I've used a password manager so a lot of the need for that has gone away. Sometimes it's nice to be able to open a page I have open on another device but I can also live without this.

I'm tired of this anti-Web and anti-accessibility SJW nonsense to the point that yeah, I'm ready to ditch Chrome.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#96

Post by delouvois »

mkl wrote: post #26
Orochikaku wrote: post #9

A couple of Google Chrome devs talk about the issues surrounding the readability of urls and their security implications and possible solutions in an episode of their podcast[0]. I think they make a compelling argument for hiding most of the url in part to prevent phishing however I do think they should allow this behaviour to be toggled via a flag. [0] https://youtu.be/0-wB1VY3Nrc

Do you know if this information is somewhere more accessible than a 20 minute video? Hiding the https and www is already frustrating enough, and this change would make Chrome barely usable for my purposes.

Their goal is full AMP dominance. Just look at these evil guys faces. It's clear enough that they're going to pass their frustrations onto you, no matter what.

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#97

Post by danjc »

I actually don't mind this for the gen pop. For them, showing the URL is a bit like showing the path to the current process in the title bar.

As a dev, hiding the HTTPS prefix is already irritating especially when copying the URL. If you copy the whole URL, you're fine. If you manually select part of it, starting with the domain, the prefix doesn't copy.

I expect this upcoming change will exacerbate this kind of problem.

Don't we just need a persistent dev mode that doesn't mess around with the URL?

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#98

Post by em-bee »

victorelu wrote: post #51
viraptor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - why do you want to disable it?

Because I want to use my own DNS server and block ads at the DNS level rather than the browser level. With this move, Google has effectively white listed adsense / adwords to not be blocked regardless of the network settings of the device.

this is confusing.

https://www.xda-developers.com/fix-dns-ad-blocker-chrome/

seems that the problem is not async itself, but that chrome ignores the system DNS settings and uses googles own DNS servers instead.

Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

#99

Post by pbasista »

I believe that Google has evaluated it very carefully from all the possible perspectives and the net outcome for them was positive, so they went with it.

I assume that they care more about blurring the line between the "Google"-served internet and the regular internet than about losing 2% of Chrome's usage rate.

Post reply on HN