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

androidpolice.com

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

#621

Post by zrm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #607
zrm wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that's useful information that's told me redundantly by the page title and the banner at the top of the page also. I don't need the URL bar for that. In fact, using the URL bar for it assumes that the path has semantic meaning, which is not an assumption that the URL standard actually requires.

> But that's useful information that's told me redundantly by the page title and the banner at the top of the page also. I don't need the URL bar for that.

The page isn't required by anything to contain that information or to give it accurately. How do you distinguish example.edu/financial-aid/ from example.edu/~some-student/ ?

> In fact, using the URL bar for it assumes that the path has semantic meaning, which is not an assumption that the URL standard actually requires.

It doesn't assume anything, it just shows you the URL. If it has semantic meaning then you can see that -- which it commonly does.

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

#622

Post by dang »

enlyth wrote: post #14

At chrome://flags there is one called #omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls, which I have turned on. This enables you to right click on the address bar, and turn on the option "Always show full URLs". It will always shows the full URL including the protocol, but I suspect they will remove this flag at some point.

Wow, thank you so much! My nervous system already feels better with this working.

Seriously, I keep looking at the address bar to make sure the URL is still there and I'm not dreaming.

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

#623

Post by bad_user »

saagarjha wrote: post #594
bad_user wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but then again absolutely all browsers are being funded by ads. We are talking Edge, Safari, Brave, all of them. Did you know that Apple does in fact get more money from Google than Mozilla does, for keeping their search engine as the default? 12 billion dollars in 2019. Do you think Apple would activate ad blocking by default and risk losing that many billions of dollars? Speaking of which, Safari's ad…

Safari doesn't ship with an ad blocker, and its content blocking until now has worked fairly well.

That Safari doesn't ship with an ad blocker, indeed, that was the point, and it never will.

And its content blocking, speaking both as a user and as somebody that worked on anti-ad-blocking technology, is really easy to circumvent and only useful on websites that haven't adapted yet.

As an iPhone user for me it's bad enough to make me want to switch to Android. What works consistently well has been DNS-level blocking (Pi-hole, NextDNS).

For you it might be OK, but I can tell you Safari is a favorite among the big players in this space [1].

[1] https://www.betterads.org/members/

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

#625

Post by dang »

pvg wrote: post #178

This is a setting, in flags (i.e. not in regular settings, the whole section in the ui is marked 'experiments') in the dev/canary builds of the browser. It defaults to off . The article (and even its slightly HN-improved title) is pure ragebait.

I've revised the title to reflect this a little better. The discussion indicates community interest in the topic that maybe exceeds the impact of this particular story, but it's genuine interest, and I don't think it's just rage.

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

#627

Post by dang »

birksherty wrote: post #49
enlyth wrote: post #14

At chrome://flags there is one called #omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls, which I have turned on. This enables you to right click on the address bar, and turn on the option "Always show full URLs". It will always shows the full URL including the protocol, but I suspect they will remove this flag at some point.

Yes they always remove such flags later, does not matter if it's there right now.

In fairness, the OP is about another such flag, so the same argument would apply to that one.

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

#629

Post by takeda »

satyrnein wrote: post #490
mysterydip wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't that the point of this change, only showing the domain to prevent phishing?

No, they already were doing that by using color to make the other parts less prominent. There is no good explanation to to this change than making people rely more on Google search.
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