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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

#661

Post by shadowgovt »

zrm wrote: post #659
shadowgovt wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cont…

That hypothetical naive first-time user is going to be as fooled by ~financial-aid, or by ~some-user/financial-aid. Showing the full URL path doesn't fix that risk scenario.

The other scenario you describe, if the risk is someone intentionally deceiving users by cloning a page on the university network owned by someone else for deceptive purposes, is better solved by a university disciplinary hearing than by expecting every student to understand URL paths.

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

#662

Post by csmoak »

neycoda wrote: post #499
wyattpeak wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"This PC > Downloads" may point to the same directory as "C:\Users\Wyatt\Downloads", but Explorer may also handle or display differently or with different options. I've had various issues with this, such as not being able to copy the full actual path from the address bar, a sub-folder in one of these "This PC" folders or libraries showing no columns with no option to show them, and sometimes being indistinguishable f…

In Windows Explorer, if you click to the right of the breadcrumbs, you will get a text input with the full path to the current directory. If a solution for URLs were to attempt to switch to breadcrumbs (seems like it should be site-configurable via a meta tag or something), then a similar click to the right of the breadcrumbs could expose the underlying URL.

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

#663

Post by ZenPsycho »

cletus wrote: post #94

Another phrase I live by: "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." There will be some VP of Product or Engineering buried deep in the bureaucracy who is pushing this, deciding with no evidence (or, worse, lots of evidence to the contrary; believe me this happens) that it is the "users who are wrong" [1]. It now takes something like 4 taps to get to the point where I can correct or otherwise edit the URL in m…

who precisely are you referring to when you say anti-accessibility SJW here? can you name anyone specific?

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

#664

Post by xg15 »

userbinator wrote: post #652
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 start…

Not sure how much actual conspiracy is in there, but I've definitly noticed that the gap between "consumer software" (highly optimized for ease of use but also highly limited and designed with a specific intention how users should interact with it) and "professional software" (powerful and flexible but only usable after extensive training, often command-line only) is widening instead of closing.

There are also definitly conscious design descisions how "cryptic" a particular feature should appear to users. I remember several bugzilla threads with discussion whether a config option should be exposed as an "ordinary" field in the settings or only as an option in about:config, so that normal users won't find it.

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

#665

Post by _y5hn »

kungato wrote: post #412
_y5hn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dumb down users, they become dumber.

People should not educate themselves on the details of implementation of the browser or internet as much as they don't educate themselves about the details of the car. We have many other complex systems with simple end user goals and people don't have to care about the details. The Americans don't even have the gear shift

What is the conclusion of your hypothesis though, if users become unable to find and validate their services ie. like online banking, from possible fishing sites or otherwise hacked pages. Knowledge is power. So we need to be careful about making people impoverished or too reliant on centrally commanded portals, or prepare to face the consequences.

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

#666

Post by feanaro »

mschuster91 wrote: post #447
AsyncAwait wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's still an option.

Not for serious web development (dito for Safari): the developer tools are atrocious compared to Chrome, the battery life experience is way worse with FF, and while Chrome is a notorious CPU and RAM hog, FF is worse. That combined with both FF and especially Safari being way behind in terms of standards adoption/development really sucks at the moment. Chrome desperately needs competition.

Why do you say so with such certainty, though? I find it nearly impossible that you never saw someone claiming the opposite. There's even such a response to your own comment so clearly this experience is not universal.

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

#667

Post by feanaro »

ethagnawl wrote: post #421
cancerSpreads wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of Firefox on Windows as software is much to be desired. Due to slow loading, I'm considering whatever they call the Microsoft browser today.

Is this still true in Firefox >= 57?

Not in my experience.

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

#668

Post by franga2000 »

thu2111 wrote: post #651
taylus wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hacki…

> The URL bar is a disaster for end users. [...] 25% of users don't look at the URL bar at all even when typing in passwords

"Side view mirrors are a disaster for drivers. 25% of drivers don't even check them before making a turn." [I'll stop the metaphor here, as I think my point was clear]

This change does exactly nothing to improve security. As for usability, it just puts one more layer of paint over the underlying "complexity" - and we've seen before how well that works (see basically every part of Windows 10 for examples).

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

#669

Post by skissane »

ceejayoz wrote: post #494
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.

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.

When he told me this, I thought he was talking about ASCII, but I had to actually double-check with "man ascii", because 5B/5D sounded familiar but wasn't 100% sure he was right.

But the point is not that he memorises the ASCII table. The value is that he learns that computers internally represent letters/punctuation as numbers. The underlying concept is what's important, and the learning of specific values is mainly useful as a way of learning and reinforcing that underlying concept.

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

#670

Post by skissane »

ceejayoz wrote: post #581
cameronbrown wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree kids can learn useful stuff in Minecraft, no doubt.

But when I was his age, all I had was MS-DOS 3.3. And I had to CD around to various directories, DIR *.EXE to remember the names of executables, etc. It was an environment that exposed more technical details, and kids who are predisposed to learn technical details learn a lot just by using it. Windows 10, doesn't promote the learning of technical details to anywhere near the same extent.

(I try to make up for it a bit. I introduced him to DOSBox.)

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