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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

#511

Post by zrm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #435
Santosh83 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hiding part of the path allows them to shrink the bar horizontally, which leaves more room for other content, such as chrome extensions.

The URL can already be longer than the screen to begin with, so they could still do that and show as much as will fit, showing the rest if you click on it. This is already what Firefox does.

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

#512

Post by shadowgovt »

anewdirection wrote: post #406
Marsymars wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly leave telemetry on in products I care about specifically so that my advanced use cases get logged.

Thats admirable, but you are a minority within a minority.

Honestly, if most "advanced" users turn off the features that Google uses to gather data to improve UX, it's strong signal UX isn't important enough to "advanced" users for Google to optimize for it.

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

#513

Post by shadowgovt »

andrewprock wrote: post #474
marksomnian wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extension ID is literally hard coded in the code of the scheme hiding code. https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:c...

How a proprietary extension can get preferential features illustrates that chromium is open source in name only.

Hardly. If you look at firefox's source, you will find several extensions that are hard-coded for special handling. This is not new.

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

#514

Post by shadowgovt »

nsuser3 wrote: post #213
bigyikes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s so bad about hiding www? I kind of prefer it hidden

Real example of why this is a bad idea: www.cs.usfca.edu is not cs.usfca.edu. The latter doesn't even have a DNS entry set up.. A screenshot of the browser will not show the www, making it more difficult to find the website.

How, in the 21st century, has USFCA not gotten the memo to redirect HTTP requests to a root domain to a default subdomain instead of black-holing them?

At this point, That's just sloppiness on USFCA's part.

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

#515

Post by paulcole »

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…

> Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result

Maybe like a decade ago this was a student project that Google sponsored (maybe as either Summer of Code or some precursor to that). A student group developed a system for “tagging” a page with a series of “random” but memorable words that could be used to identify a page. Kinda like how imgur and other other sites generate URLs now. Like “glittery hamster bananas” or something like that.

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

#516

Post by shadowgovt »

zrm wrote: post #511
shadowgovt wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiding part of the path allows them to shrink the bar horizontally, which leaves more room for other content, such as chrome extensions.

The URL can already be longer than the screen to begin with, so they could still do that and show as much as will fit, showing the rest if you click on it. This is already what Firefox does.

But from a UI standpoint, having a text box that is too small for its common displayed content is sloppy. If the path usually makes things too long, hide the path by default until the user asks for it.

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

#517

Post by paulcole »

hckr_news wrote: post #418
e1ghtSpace wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats wrong with AMP pages?

I don’t click on a search result to read google.

Why do you click on a search result?

For me, it’s to get information. Why do I care what format the information is presented in?

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

#518

Post by superkuh »

shadowgovt wrote: post #496
superkuh wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> misses Google's goals overall.

Oh, I'm not missing that. Google's software offerings are now primarily designed for bad computers with bad UI, bad network, and bad energy storage. Because people love those crappy devices and most use them primarily. We both agree.

>A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space,

Which really doesn't matter if you're on a desktop computer with an actual monitor. The only reason to do this is more "convergence" BS and thinking phone crutches are required on desktop.

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

#519

Post by shervinafshar »

ceejayoz wrote: post #494
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.

I think the value is not in memorizing such trivia; for a 7 years old it might be discovering the pattern of data encoding and its why and how. It opens all sort of paths of discovery in future for understanding software.

You'd be surprised how often veteran developers fail to grasp intermediate Unicode concepts (surrogate pairs, for instance) probably since they skipped over (or was not curious enough about) implementation details of such abstractions.

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

#520

Post by shadowgovt »

freeflight wrote: post #509
shadowgovt wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad analogy. AMP is a Google content proxying technology, and Google isn't generally understood to be a "sketchy site." Users with the level of paranoia that puts Google in the "untrusted site" space should be sidestepping this whole conversation by avoiding using the browser Google develops regardless of what Google does to its URL bar.

> AMP is a Google content proxying technology, and Google isn't generally understood to be a "sketchy site." The whole idea of AMP pages is sketchy by default, as it's Google taking content from websites run by news media outlets and hosting it on their own servers so they have even more control over user-tracking. In the long term, this has the potential to further centralize the Internet, something the Internet was…

Again, people concerned over this risk scenario should be switching to another browser regardless of what it does to the URL bar, right? I doubt we're going to find many users who's thought process runs "I'm really concerned about the long-term risk of Google building a dystopian information warehousing monoculture, but I was still going to use chrome. But now that they're changing the UI to, I assume, support their goals of building a dystopian information warehousing monoculture, it's A BRIDGE TOO FAR."
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