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

Post by FalconSensei » Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

gpanders wrote: post #589

FalconSensei wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Post by slmjkdbtl » Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

    https://www.google.com/search?q=duck&oq=duck&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59j0l3j46j0j69i65.864j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Post by mthoms » Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #520

freeflight wrote: post #509

Earlier 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…

Post by ptx » Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #275

ptx wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the reason for this confusion might be Google's long-standing efforts to blur the line between search and plain URL-based navigation, starting with integrating search into the location field in Chrome – Firefox and Safari[1] used to separate them, which makes the concepts clearer and avoids sending URLs and (local history) searches to the search provider unintentionally. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis…

I remember this being the magical thing together with less wasted vertical space that made me switch to Chrome back in the day, it was (and still is) so simple! Always had the search field taking up precious space in Firefox but never really using it because it was a different mental route, like this is smart but why am I not using it? I think it is down to having to consciously decide to search before starting to ty…

Post by granzymes » Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

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…