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

141–150 of 733 posts

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

#141

Post by Swenrekcah »

ben_w wrote: post #102
cletus wrote: post #94

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 m…

Insightful, but I am confused by the final paragraph: > I'm tired of this anti-Web and anti-accessibility SJW nonsense “SJW” must have a meaning I’m not familiar with, because Social Justice Warriors would be pro-accessibility, not anti.

Perhaps they meant something like vigilantism or a crusade, and feel it's synonymous with SJW.

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

#143

Post by flas9sd »

Omnibox concept could help mobile browsers - not that Google would give this screen real estate easily away - but what if the address bar could serve as site wide search of the current site at all times with no more interactions. Absolving website sticky headers, sandwich menus. This could empower the "native web" against apps on small-screen devices.

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

#144

Post by onion2k »

jpxw wrote: post #18
Gehinnn wrote: post #4

This might be harmful to github pages where it would hide the repository name. If they include this without offering an option to turn it off, I will quit using Chrome.

Also any of the many sites where content for different people is hosted under example.com/~username/content

That's technically correct, but as far as the security of the website is concerned example.com, example.com/~eviluser/uh-oh, and example.com/nefarious/sub/directory/pretending/to/be/google.com/ are all exactly the same. The issue Google are trying to "fix" is making it more clear that the domain the user sees is what they're really looking for. If a user on a website is being evil it's up to the website owner to stop that, not Google. Google are trying to protect people against evil website owners (or so they say...).

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

#145

Post by ubercow13 »

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.

The claimed purpose is basically just to prevent phishing.

They explain a number of reasons why it is difficult for people to extract from a URL the part which is relevant to security, ie. the bit that affects who has authority over the page and how your cookies will be separated by the browser. The cookie sharing actually had some rules I didn't know about as a non-web developer but experienced URL user. They show how every browser is already going some way towards this but they all have some problems, for example Safari shows the full domain not just the important part.

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

#146

Post by Keloo »

GoToRO wrote: post #86
curiousgal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Firefox years ago and never looked back.

I never switched away from Firefox. I am old enough to know that nothing comes free, especially from a Big Corporation. As customers, all we can do is to always keep a good alternative alive, no matter what.

But Chrome is not free (well kind of). It saves lot's of money in royalties for Google (because Google search is the default search engine in Chrome). So even if it's 'free' it saves money for Google.

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

#147

Post by vladvasiliu »

gspr wrote: post #64
jpxw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also any of the many sites where content for different people is hosted under example.com/~username/content

Next step: an "education campaign" to tell people that that part of the web is "insecure". In fact you should only get any content from a handful of domains. And in non-net-neutrality jurisdictions, the ISPs will start offering packages that work with pre-approved domains only. And since it'll be enough for 90% people, it'll work. I hope I'm just being alarmist.

This already kind of happens in Firefox. If you have a non public certificate authority, when you visit a site signed by that CA it says that it's not verified by an authority known to Firefox.

I don't know if there is a way to "bless" such an authority once it's added to the trust store.

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

#149

Post by scandox »

I'm against this. But: it's 2020 and still a huge number of people I deal with every day type the name of our product into their search bar and then login at the first site returned. Most don't know the difference between a browser and a specific website. It's all just a big Smush to them apparently.

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

#150

Post by dgoldstein0 »

birksherty wrote: post #49
enlyth wrote: post #14

At chrome://flags there is one called #omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls, which I have turned on. This enables you to right click on the address bar, and turn on the option "Always show full URLs". It will always shows the full URL including the protocol, but I suspect they will remove this flag at some point.

Yes they always remove such flags later, does not matter if it's there right now.

This is exactly what I'm afraid of. there used to be chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains (when I google how to make chrome show the full url bar, this is the recommended answer) but it's been gone entirely for several Chrome versions. I even toggled a flag to undo flag deprecations in Chrome 78 to get this back but that didn't work very long - I think this flag has been totally dead since Chrome 80ish.

I personally don't care much what the default is for the normal user, but I want to be able to have my full urls.

Post reply on HN