Can we all please go back to Firefox?
Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
571–580 of 733 posts
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to say, but your a bit naive if you think they're doing it for cosmetic reasons.
1) I'm not generally in the habit of prognosticating all of the reasons a corporation the size of Google tries to do something, especially not when there's an apparent and obvious win possible from the change itself. Minimizing the URL bar leaves room for other things on the page, including chrome extensions and, possibly, page content. 2) UI improvements are not "cosmetic reasons," they directly translate to ease an…
Well I'm exhausted by UI/UX engineers oversimplifying things that are inherently complex. To the point to not really helping people simplifying their work and totally hindering advanced user. There is a reason industrial UI usually don't suffer this, because complex interfaces are there for a reason.
You know what else is "a UI space resource hog" on the web ? Advertising. And I'm sorry but "wasted" space is generally much bigger. So, no, I'm not ready to loose my address bar for bigger ads.
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#573Wow, this is epic scumbaggery.
I still stick to Chrome because of all the syncing features it has across many of the devices I use, PC, Mobile, Mac and my own laptop. I remember at sometime in the past they hid URL query parameters by default, until the user clicked on the address bar.
It's so obvious this move makes it harder for people to copy-paste links, which is a common practice, and moreover misleads people when they try to know what page they're on lol.
test.com/profile or test.com/dashboard/favorites
or many other pages that look like `home pages` of websites are now going to be misinterpreted as actual home pages themselves by users because of this witchery.
If Google thinks this is a good move in that they can get people to land on websites through Search and not directly, it's an undoubtable massive deal-breaker for people like me.
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#574Google is dumbing down tech so new users don't understand the basics of the internet. Seems like a winning strategy and the culture they have built their company on.
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
But switching to another browser does nothing to challenge AMP, as these changes are mostly pushed on the server-end while changes to the browser end, like this one, serve to further obfuscate this consolidation of Google's dominance on the web.
In that context, it's a bit cynical to belittle the problem as you are doing there when this has been a very real issue for several years. As by now Google, Facebook, and Amazon control the vast majority of web traffic and have been doing so for years already [0].
This isn't some hypothetical scenario, it's something that's already very real.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the things you mentioned about Brave make them funded by Google, and the system they want for ads is clearly better for the consumer than the status quo.
Brave is essentially a repackaged Chrome and does nothing to help undermine the Blink monopoly. They're not directly funded by Google, but their browser depends directly on Google funding Chrome's development.
If Google disappeared tomorrow, Brave would continue to exist and would continue to get updates.
Brave does not depend on Google, directly or otherwise. They depend on an open source project called Chromium, which is largely developed by Google, but because it is open source anyone can build off of it.
Brave funds their development through the BAT token and through affiliate marketing, both of which are much better for user privacy and security, and much more resilient to Google than where Mozilla is getting its money.
No, I don't think Apple would integrate thorough ad-blocking by default, just as I don't think Mozilla will do this either. Brave has already done it. Brave's ad-blocker works better by default than any ad-blocker I've used, and I've tried them all.
HN's hate-boner for Brave is very strange. They clearly care more about user privacy than any other browser vendor (except maybe Safari, but again they have a conflict of interest), and it is built on a core that is arguably the best at handling the modern web (Chromium).
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same for the history, I much prefer it in Safari than Chrome. It looks like Chrome make it worthless on purpose so that we use Google instead of looking through our history.
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#578If 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…
I assume that crack smoking ux designers made this decision
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#579Well you have to do something when search and ad revenue is slowly creeping away.
These are dark patterns, making way for other browsers, such as Firefox.
Re: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) I'm not generally in the habit of prognosticating all of the reasons a corporation the size of Google tries to do something, especially not when there's an apparent and obvious win possible from the change itself. Minimizing the URL bar leaves room for other things on the page, including chrome extensions and, possibly, page content. 2) UI improvements are not "cosmetic reasons," they directly translate to ease an…
Well I'm exhausted by UI/UX engineers oversimplifying things that are inherently complex. To the point to not really helping people simplifying their work and totally hindering advanced user. There is a reason industrial UI usually don't suffer this, because complex interfaces are there for a reason. You know what else is "a UI space resource hog" on the web ? Advertising. And I'm sorry but "wasted" space is generall…
There's a reason most commodity software doesn't adhere to industrial UI standards.
Chrome is well into the commodity software scale, and one should assume its UI decisions will lean in the direction of maximum utility for the most users.