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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

#651

Post by thu2111 »

taylus wrote: post #472
qwertox wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already annoyed by the hassle it has become to copy a substring of the URL into the clipboard, due to the schemes being hidden. Nothing has been won by hiding http(s):// as well as the www subdomain.

Them acting like this is some kind of user experience thing is the most insulting part.

But it is.

The URL bar is a disaster for end users. It's full of random junk that users can't read so they stop trying, which means they can then be tricked by phishing websites hosted on any domain at all. Research shows about 25% of users don't look at the URL bar at all even when typing in passwords, they navigate purely by sight, so it's impossible to stop them being phished. The human cost of the resulting hacking is significant.

The fact that the software industry has routinely prioritised historical inertia, the needs of web developers, and all kinds of other trivialities over the security of billions of people is embarrassing. I'm glad to see the Chrome team finally get a grip on this and make the URL bar actually useful for people.

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

#652

Post by userbinator »

skissane wrote: post #210

The other day, our 7 year old told me that [ is 5B and ] is 5D. I was quite impressed that he knew this, and I asked him how he knew it. He told me it was from reading the address bar in Roblox. Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.

This, exactly. People learn not only when they are forced to, but naturally from observing their environment too. The more opportunities to "spontaneously learn" you take away from them, the less they will learn.

Here's a comment I made from several years ago when Chrome tried to do before what it's trying again now (it's not the first time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729

Maybe this next point is starting to go into the realm of conspiracy theory, but I see far too much evidence of it every day: companies are doing this because they don't want users to learn. They want to keep users naive, docile, and compliant, and thus easier to "herd" for their purposes. They don't want people knowing the truth behind how things work; they would rather "developers" (and only those who explicitly chose to be one --- probably for monetary reasons) learn from their officially sanctioned documentation (which does not tell the whole truth), and not think or discover for themselves.

(I've memorised most of printable ASCII because I did a lot of Asm programming decades ago, so I instantly understood what you mean.)

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

#653

Post by userbinator »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #613

The click/edit to show full url is a good and intuitive design. A lot of websites just have terribly designed urls, with tons of obscure nesting paths and ?x=y flags that users don't care about. Here's what I got from searching the word "duck" in chrome search bar: https://www.google.com/search?q=duck&oq=duck&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59j0l3j46j0j69i65.864j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 why would I care about the op, aps, s…

why would I care about the op, aps, sourceid and ie?

Because they may be tracking identifiers...

...which I could argue is precisely why they don't want you to know. I always sanitise URLs when I share them with others, because of such things.

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

#654

Post by userbinator »

Spivak wrote: post #647
zajio1am wrote: post #457

I would say that removing URL is also bad UI - if user sees that URL changes with navigation, then it is possible to guess that it can be copied and pasted to give a link for current page. If the URL bar would offer full URL for copy/paste, but show only the domain, then the feature of full URL copy/paste is hidden.

Or you just hit the share button? I think copy-and-paste would be considered the bad UX if it was new idea today. I think user-visible links would be considered bad UX if it was presented today. “Alright then you copy this opaque hundred character string into your chat window, make sure you get everything after the dollar sign, or strip it out. Depends on the site.” Copy and paste is the lowest common denominator of…

Or you just hit the share button?

...which does who-knows-what behind your back, including possibly communicating with a third-party to see if you are "properly authorised to share", and meanwhile allowing them to subtly insert themselves into monitoring everyone's communication?

Do NOT want.

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

#656

Post by solf »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #451
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…

While we often create a mental map between some sort of logical hierarchy and the segments of the url this doesn't have to be the case. A specific domain should be authority on this, not he general-purpose tool used to access it.

[flagged]

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

#657

Post by lopmotr »

I think web developers are so used to URLs they don't realize how ridiculous they are. If you were inventing the web from scratch, there's no way you'd require a non-human-readable string displayed in the most prominent position on every single page and it's editable! How do people know how to edit it? Each site has its own unique undocumented parameters and formatting. It tells you something about the state of the page but not everything needed to debug problems. Also, don't make a SPA with an unchanging URL because you'll lose all the "important" value of a URL.

Desktop and mobile apps somehow survive without them. If URLs are important, why don't developers include their own URL system in those?

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

#658

Post by lopmotr »

simonkafan wrote: post #27

Isn't this a good example of "feature creep"? I dont see any reason why it makes a browser more useful when the URL is partially hidden. It reminds me of a company which developed a product which was more or less done. So the SWE manager and the product manager made up new (pretty useless) features just to tell their bosses the devs are busy and the team must stay intact.

Try moving in the other direction. Have the browser always show a little bit of the HTML code or some Javascript variables. Will that make it better or worse? What's the correct amount of internal coding information to display to all users? I don't think URLs are the sweet spot of important information without useless mess.

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

#659

Post by zrm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #645
zrm wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

> How do you distinguish example.edu/financial-aid/ from example.edu/~some-student/ That's an unrealistic example because no website worth its salt is going to let students put arbitrary content in the same domain as the financial aid system. That's a recipe for leaking cookies that contain session tokens, and displaying a full URL won't save a user. By the time you see the ~some-student in the URL bar, the security…

You're making a lot of assumptions there.

It could be that example.edu/financial-aid/ is just information and PDFs and doesn't have any sessions or cookies. Or the real financial aid system is on another domain, but a first time user doesn't know that, they're just looking at www.example.edu/~some-student/ which appears to be a financial aid page that Chrome only says is example.edu.

Or any other case where the contents of the URL matters. How about example.edu/~some-student/ vs. example.edu/~a-different-student/ or example.edu/~your-professor/?

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

#660

Post by crazygringo »

tmpz22 wrote: post #620
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…

But why can't this be a toggle or user setting like in Safari? Why is it a 1-true-google-way of doing things when clearly there are users who want to keep it (even if its just web developers)?

How do you know it won't be a toggle?

Right now it is a setting to enable in Chrome.

What makes you think that once it becomes default, the switch won't remain to be able to turn it off?

Chrome is built by developers. Presumably, they pay attention to what developers need from it. Which is why their debugging tools overall are so amazing.

Perhaps you should withold criticism of what you assume they'll do until they, you know, actually do it.

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