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

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

#441

Post by Kaze404 »

Santosh83 wrote: post #433
shadowgovt wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The URL bar takes up a huge amount of screen real estate and is a piece of information that the user almost never needs once they have confirmed they navigated successfully to the desired page. Developers are a special case user and capable of handling advanced UIs that hide information until it is needed. It's iconic but it's a UI space resource hog. To improve browser experience, sometimes one has to be willing to…

Hmm, don't all mobile browsers already autohide the URL bar when the page starts scrolling up? Seems like that worked fine so far. Besides the OP is about hiding part of the URL (path), not the URL bar of the browsers.

Seems Firefox previews doesn't, and I honestly prefer it that way. They moved it to the bottom of the screen which makes it easier to use and less intrusive.

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

#442

Post by tuukkah »

shadowgovt wrote: post #400
tuukkah wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that when Chrome is unusable for developers (such as hiding the URL!), it's always a feature not a bug?

If I need the whole URL visible at all times as a developer, that's an hour of chrome extension writing to make it always viewable. Can I pull that off in FF?

I'm not sure I understand. Are you asking whether Firefox supports browser extensions? If so, the answer is yes. Firefox has always had extensions including epic breakthroughs such as Adblock (Plus) from 2002 and Firebug from 2006. (Google Chrome has had extensions since 2010.)

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

#443

Post by Dylan16807 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #425
Dylan16807 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything might be two different websites. You could send different websites based on what port the request comes from. But doing so would be bad and wrong, and showing the user the outgoing port is definitely not necessary.

> You could send different websites based on what port the request comes from. But that's you controlling that, as the person running the website. When it's the user controlling it, by setting which domain to visit, that's in their control, so they need to see it in their UI. If you're going to reduce to the absurdity of 'anyone could serve anything from anywhere' then why show a domain at all? ebay.com could serve m…

The person controlling the website is responsible for making www and non-www show the same thing, as well as making http and https show the same thing. (Redirects are fine.) A user's ability to affect something doesn't automatically mean it's their responsibility.

I'm not making an argument about what should be shown right now, I just think your argument, based on what "might be different", is pretty flawed.

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

#444

Post by Epskampie »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #266
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #87

If their goal is really to help detect fraudulent sites (the sorts of google.com.notahacker.tk), they can just show the domain in a more prominent way -- they're already deemphasizing the part of the URL after the domain name anyway. This is clearly not their motive. What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL. This is the biggest threat to the web that we loved for s…

I assume the goal is to make sure that people never remember the URL and always use Google to get anywhere. Most people probably already do, but maybe increasing their number from 80% to 90% is still worth it. If this is indeed the real motivation, the next obvious target would be bookmarks. What can be done about them? Replace the bookmarked URLs by Google queries? It would be an interesting functionality if Google…

The bookmarking functions in chrome are already extremely weak, I guess for the reason you point out. No tagging, only folders, results when searching don’t get top position in the omnibar.

Bookmarking is one of the areas where firefox is clearly superior.

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

#445

Post by Jedd »

sorenjan wrote: post #332

I actually wouldn't mind if the URL bar was replaced with a breadcrumb bar on some sites, like news and forums. Imagine something like Example.com > Worldnews > 2020 > 06 > 14 > Big aquatic monster spotted outside of Tokyo or forum.example.com > Sport > Football > Spain > Real Madrid It could then work like in Explorer in Windows 10, where you can press one of the breadcrumb separators and see a menu with siblings, o…

> I actually wouldn't mind if the URL bar was replaced with a breadcrumb bar on some sites ...

Which sites?

Anyway, almost everyone else would mind. Especially if there was no option to revert to normal behaviour.

> It could then work like in Explorer in Windows 10, ...

That sounds like the worst of both worlds. If people want Explorer in Windows 10 behaviour - can't they just run Explorer in Windows 10?

If people want Chrome as it was yesterday, they've basically got no option now.

> But URLs aren't necessarily always the best solution for navigation.

The Chromium devs demonstrated their lack of interest in being able to navigate via URL / location bar a half decade ago when they changed the default on all operating systems to be single-click in location bar to 'select the whole address'.

I'm beginning to think they are not our friends.

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

#446

Post by zajio1am »

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.

It would be harmful for any site, whose content 'root' is not (sub)domain. Thus most user-submitted content - projects on github, youtube channels, ...

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

#447

Post by mschuster91 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #381
butz wrote: post #62

While this might be useful for a casual user, hidden URLs are a huge problem for web developers. Asking for a screenshot from client is not enough, now I'll have to provide additional instructions how to copy/paste full URL when reporting issues. Not to mention all possible problems with misconfigured servers when www and www-less domains lead to same website, but some script refuses to work on one of those. While it…

Firefox's still an option.

Not for serious web development (dito for Safari): the developer tools are atrocious compared to Chrome, the battery life experience is way worse with FF, and while Chrome is a notorious CPU and RAM hog, FF is worse.

That combined with both FF and especially Safari being way behind in terms of standards adoption/development really sucks at the moment. Chrome desperately needs competition.

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

#448

Post by chrisseaton »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #443
chrisseaton wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could send different websites based on what port the request comes from. But that's you controlling that, as the person running the website. When it's the user controlling it, by setting which domain to visit, that's in their control, so they need to see it in their UI. If you're going to reduce to the absurdity of 'anyone could serve anything from anywhere' then why show a domain at all? ebay.com could serve m…

The person controlling the website is responsible for making www and non-www show the same thing, as well as making http and https show the same thing. (Redirects are fine.) A user's ability to affect something doesn't automatically mean it's their responsibility. I'm not making an argument about what should be shown right now, I just think your argument, based on what "might be different", is pretty flawed.

> The person controlling the website is responsible for making www and non-www show the same thing, as well as making http and https show the same thing. (Redirects are fine.)

But there's no standard that requires this, that I'm aware of.

Chrome are acting like there is, but I believe there isn't.

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

#450

Post by Kaze404 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #400
tuukkah wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that when Chrome is unusable for developers (such as hiding the URL!), it's always a feature not a bug?

If I need the whole URL visible at all times as a developer, that's an hour of chrome extension writing to make it always viewable. Can I pull that off in FF?

> If I need the whole URL visible at all times as a developer, that's an hour of chrome extension writing to make it always viewable.

Interesting. Other comments in this thread indicate that the only extension that can do this has its ID hard-coded in the url parsing code to be whitelisted.

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