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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

#551

Post by dataflow »

shadowgovt wrote: post #548
dataflow wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know software with good UX used to exist before telemetry became a thing?

Definitely, and it continues to exist after as well. But telemetry gives web developers an extremely simple and convenient tool to know what users are actually doing without even inconveniencing the users with explicit questions. I've done web development with a good telemetry set built into a page, and it is extremely informative regarding how users actually use the tool, as opposed to how the UX designers have pred…

Yeah, invading people's privacy always makes things easier for everyone else, doesn't it? Doesn't mean people who care about it don't want or deserve quality...

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

#552

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#553

Post by shadowgovt »

dataflow wrote: post #551
shadowgovt wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, and it continues to exist after as well. But telemetry gives web developers an extremely simple and convenient tool to know what users are actually doing without even inconveniencing the users with explicit questions. I've done web development with a good telemetry set built into a page, and it is extremely informative regarding how users actually use the tool, as opposed to how the UX designers have pred…

Yeah, invading people's privacy always makes things easier for everyone else, doesn't it? Doesn't mean people who care about it don't want or deserve quality...

"Deserve" is complicated. To a first approximation that ignores a lot of details... What have they done to "deserve" it? They didn't buy it. They aren't making the process of figuring out what they want particularly easy.

People who don't show up to vote also "deserve" a good government by virtue of being people who have to live in a governed society. It's harder to make one for them if the system for selecting leaders is missing their input, regardless of what they deserve.

Popping out of the government analogy and back to software, power users are also in a position where they are more capable of adjusting their experience to suit their needs. All things being equal, a company with finite resources to develop software should dedicate those resources to assisting the non-power users more often than power users.

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

#555

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

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…

> What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL

A few months back, people on HN were wondering why creating a new tab in Firefox causes the URL bar to become magnified.

I wonder if this is part of the reason. Perhaps Firefox believes they have to educate users about the URL bar because Chrome is attacking it.

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

#556

Post by soared »

karmakaze wrote: post #537
crazygringo wrote: post #532

Safari has been this way since 2014. I've never seen any pushback on Apple doing it over the past six years . It's genuinely a benefit for the vast, vast majority of users, where the only important piece of information really is the domain name, to check which site you're actually on. And for more info, you can just click. Copying the URL becomes no more difficult. The URL path beyond the domain is as useful to most…

The people who use Safari is exactly the demographic that this change targets. Chrome users includes most developers who are the ones to complain.

Developers are <1% of users - anything outside of dev tools is not changed with them in mind.

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

#558

Post by abraham »

bbarn wrote: post #81

Why not just use a syntax highlighting approach on the address bar? Protocol one color, domain another, slashes one color, query params another, etc.

Using color to convey information is very difficult to make it be accessible while still working with themes and being aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

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

#559

Post by blacklight »

"Showing the full URL may detract from the parts of the URL that are more important to making a security decision on a webpage".

Oh, really? As a security-aware user I really want to see the full URL to make sure it doesn't look something like https://big-vulnerable-site.com/?redirect_url=http://my-mali.... I fail to see a single use case where showing only the hostname or the domain increases the security of the browsing experience. But by now I'm also quite use to Google's way of shamelessly lying their way through.

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

#560

Post by zrm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #516
zrm wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only too small when it's too small.

https://old.reddit.com/r/space/

Fits fine and tells you at least three useful things that just "reddit.com" doesn't.

https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/h8t50n/i_often_get_a...

Doesn't fit, but even truncated it still tells you the same useful things.

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