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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

#491

Post by ndespres »

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 find the way Explorer in Windows 10 handles this behavior to be annoying and inconvenient. It finds ways to change paths into new canonical locations, for example browse to C:\Users\Yourname and instead of giving you breadcrumbs like Local Disk > Users > Yourname, it simply shows "Yourname" as a special home folder. When you click back in the address bar, there are no breadcrumbs anymore, it's erased your trail.

Attempts to make things simpler by hiding the truth about where you really are in navigation seems like a way to make the web less discoverable except by Google. If you're on a web site you can usually learn more about its structure based on URL format. This makes that more difficult.

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

#492

Post by csours »

skissane wrote: post #210

The other day, our 7 year old told me that [ is 5B and ] is 5D. I was quite impressed that he knew this, and I asked him how he knew it. He told me it was from reading the address bar in Roblox. Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.

Coffee hasn't kicked in yet, took me a while to figure out you were saying '[' url encodes to 5B and ']' url encodes to 5D

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

#493

Post by extra88 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #214
extra88 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser doesn’t warn you about sites signed by a CA not in their list of CAs?

I specifically said "once it's added to the trust store". It is known to the browser. When I wrote the message I wasn't in front of Firefox, now I am. So to summarize: * The CA's certificate is added to the Firefox store and trusted. * Visiting a site gets the lock in the address bar. * Clicking on the lock in bar shows "Connection secure. Connection is verified by a certificate issuer that is not recognized by Mozil…

So what’s the problem? Mozilla didn’t add the CA to the trust store, you did, that’s why Mozilla doesn’t recognize it. It doesn’t sound like it interferes with normal operation and differentiating bundled and added CAs on inspection sounds like a good idea.

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

#494

Post by ceejayoz »

skissane wrote: post #210

The other day, our 7 year old told me that [ is 5B and ] is 5D. I was quite impressed that he knew this, and I asked him how he knew it. He told me it was from reading the address bar in Roblox. Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.

Is that a meaningful piece of learning, though? I’ve been doing webdev since the 1990s and still look up character codes if I need them.

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

#496

Post by shadowgovt »

superkuh wrote: post #484
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…

To improve browser experience all you have to do is use a computer that doesn't suck. The fact that your primary browser is on a tiny phone display is a problem with phones, not with browsers. Browser for phones can evolve to match the disabled nature of their device's but lets hope such gimpings don't filter back into actual desktop computers.

I'm actually not thinking about the phone form factor at all. A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space, which leaves more room for chrome extensions.

Also, "use a real computer" is a pretty elitist attitude that misses Google's goals overall. Google is not targeting exclusively users that have desktop machines with multiple cores and graphics accelerator cards. They want to provide internet services and internet access to people whose only portal to the web is a mobile device.

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

#497

Post by shadowgovt »

Kaze404 wrote: post #450
shadowgovt wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An extension can get window.location and can then paint it anywhere on the page the developer chooses, or put it in a drop down, or send it to an external service via an HTTP request and beam it to the moon, if the developer wishes.

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

#498

Post by Mirioron »

kiwidrew wrote: post #374
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…

Yes, imagine if the browser vendors decided to _improve the usability of the URL bar_ instead of trying to remove it... The only difference between Example.com > Worldnews > 2020 > 06 > 14 > Big aquatic monster spotted outside Tokyo forum.example.com > Sport > Football > Spain > Real Madrid and https://example.com/worldnews/2020/06/14/big-aquatic-monster-spotted-outside-tokyo https://forum.example.com/sport/football/…

>And probably some clever logic to deal with the randomforum.php?fid=12345&tpcid=984.3&page=5 goop that is still all-too-common... :/

You say that as though websites like that are random small sites. HN has that kind of a URL, so do YouTube and Google.

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

#499

Post by neycoda »

wyattpeak wrote: post #417
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 really dislike any attempt to modify strings like this. I find it invariably causes problems in edge cases. What if a site handles slashes differently to how Google expects? Where do GET arguments go? What if I want to modify the URL? Breadcrumbs are great when each part is navigable, but does example.com/worldnews/2020/06 actually lead anywhere, or is it an invalid address for the site? I have absolutely no intere…

"This PC > Downloads" may point to the same directory as "C:\Users\Wyatt\Downloads", but Explorer may also handle or display differently or with different options. I've had various issues with this, such as not being able to copy the full actual path from the address bar, a sub-folder in one of these "This PC" folders or libraries showing no columns with no option to show them, and sometimes being indistinguishable from the Public folder. The full path matters in Explorer, Finder, and browsers, and should never be hidden without an easy visible way to show the full path or have it always show.

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

#500

Post by shadowgovt »

Santosh83 wrote: post #440
shadowgovt wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing, if Google is responsive enough to implementing new technologies and improving their browser, there's no reason for most web devs to advocate for an alternative browser. A (high-quality) monoculture is actually much much easier on most web devs, because it minimizes the number of browsers they have to support for quirks.

Same as saying a benevolent tyrant is the best govt. Viewed from a certain angle it could be arguably true, yet none of us would trade democracy for it because we understand quality and efficiency are not the only factors but need to be weighed with other ethical and social ones. The history of biological evolution shows that monocultures invariably fail catastrophically. Diversity is the main way to guard against un…

I'd be conservative extrapolating from lessons of government and biology to software engineering principles. Software doesn't change via random mutation and natural selection pressure; most open source projects are benevolent dictatorships of some flavor or other.
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