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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

#671

Post by skissane »

userbinator wrote: post #653
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.

> I always sanitise URLs when I share them with others, because of such things.

Same here. Before sharing URLs with others, I often experiment with removing parameters to find the minimal URL that still works, and then share that.

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

#672

Post by dhms »

on_and_off wrote: post #564
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…

As long as you see the full url when you hover/click on the bar, I am all for it as well. If find some of reactions on this ridiculously hyperbolic "biggest attack on the web in years" ? seriously ? I get it, Google is a gigantic monster that does not necessarily act in its users best interests, but that does not mean we need to bring the pitchfork each time they launch an app update.

On that note, I noticed recently that Google search result links (on Firefox?) get rewritten. That is, you see the actual page URL when you hover over the link, but it's changed to their own redirect URL as soon as you click it.

I'm sure they've always been tracking these search result clicks, but I think this is a somewhat new behavior, and I find it highly deceiving.

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

#673

Post by zrm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #661
zrm wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expectin…

> That hypothetical naive first-time user is going to be as fooled by ~financial-aid, or by ~some-user/financial-aid.

The attacker may not be able to get ~financial-aid, only ~juan-ramirez, and even if you don't know about home directories, the first thing that strikes you about ~juan-ramirez/financial-aid is that something is wrong because you are not Juan Ramirez. If you do know about home directories then it's a giant red flag which you can't see if the browser is hiding it from you.

It doesn't have to prevent 100% of attacks. Preventing 7% of attacks is still 7% better than nothing.

> 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.

The most common way things like that happen isn't the actual student who would have to be using their own name, it's that the student uses a weak password or gets their computer infected with malware and then some Russian hacker sets up on their school account.

You also don't need every user to understand them, only one who then reports it. If you don't show the paths to anybody then much more likely that nobody notices, or that it takes longer for somebody to notice and more people get compromised in the meantime.

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

#674

Post by ceejayoz »

skissane wrote: post #670
ceejayoz wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn’t it be better to be able to devote limited learning time to more useful things than locating oddly named executables, though?

It is a mistake to conflate “it was harder for me” with “I learned more”.

My kids can program more complicated stuff in Minecraft than I could at their age. Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.

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

#675

Post by mantap »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #419
shadowgovt wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That is network effect. As the smaller vendor, it's incumbent upon Mozilla to break it. Expecting individual devs to do it collectively when it really isn't in their selfish interests is waiting for a unicorn to appear.

> As the smaller vendor, it's incumbent upon Mozilla to break it. That's kind of impossible to do for a smaller vendor without wider developer cooperation. I remember Mozilla only started to breach IE's dominance once devs were so sick of IE that they installed Firefox on their mom's computer despite tons of sites being made for IE. It's possible for something like it to happen again with Chrome, but less likely sinc…

Sorry to interrupt the party here but I feel compelled to point out that Firefox's is actually the third most common engine after Blink and WebKit. The web is not and will not be a monoculture as long as the iPhone exists. There's already two ~trillion dollar juggernauts involved.

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

#676

Post by donmcronald »

robert_g wrote: post #221
rkwasny wrote: post #151

Conspiracy theory: This change is dictated by the Google AMP team that wants to take over the world without us knowing

> Conspiracy theory: This change is dictated by the Google AMP team that wants to take over the world without us knowing I was just about to write this but I don't necessarily think it's that far off. With signed exchanges, AMP pages have the ability to hide the fact you're accessing content through Google [1]. In 2016 Google wrote about testing 'mobile-first indexing' because more people are using mobile devices tha…

I wonder if they’ll eventually hide the URL path from extensions (for security) and serve ads off google.com. Even serving ads from somewhere under google.com/amp would probably cause problems for ad blockers. Or maybe extensions see the rewritten URL only, so CanSignHttpExchanges is a way of changing third party trackers and ads into first party.

Also nice to see DigiCert helping them out, but I’m not surprised with how DigiCert’s product lineup isn’t much more than a test of how much of a sucker you are.

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

#677

Post by TeMPOraL »

likeclockwork wrote: post #335
psexec wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this idiocy? https://9to5google.com/2020/06/12/google-android-chrome-blac...

The white:black :: good:evil dichotomy has been open to criticism since one group of people labeled themselves white and another group of people black. That was when the colors became politicized.

That dichotomy is older than politics, and has more to do with day being safer than night for diurnal animals like humans.

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

#678

Post by feanaro »

shadowgovt wrote: post #553
dataflow wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, invading people's privacy always makes things easier for everyone else, doesn't it? Doesn't mean people who care about it don't want or deserve quality...

"Deserve" is complicated. To a first approximation that ignores a lot of details... What have they done to "deserve" it? They didn't buy it. They aren't making the process of figuring out what they want particularly easy. People who don't show up to vote also "deserve" a good government by virtue of being people who have to live in a governed society. It's harder to make one for them if the system for selecting leade…

While you argue your case, that one has to vocalise if one wants something, well, you are still ignoring the basic want of not having your privacy violated and the fact that you can vocalise something willfully, without it being spied away from you. I'm also extremely suspicious of the suggestion that this is something only power users would want.

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

#679

Post by humanrebar »

tchaffee wrote: post #402
humanrebar wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that "blacklist" is awful because it's origins are in British history, having to do political assassination and conspiracy. Amongst a bunch of very Caucasian parties. The "black" is not racial but metaphorical, as in "the absence if light". The connection to dark-skinned folks is accidental through the science of optics. Light being good and darkness being bad is part of most (all?) monotheistic cul…

> It's worth noting that "blacklist" is awful because it's origins are in British history, > The connection to dark-skinned folks is accidental through the science of optics. Both of these are an oversimplification that leaves out other context and other history. The first recorded use of the term "blacklist" occurs at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies i…

I would appreciate citations for your claims about racial origins for the term. Wikipedia does not mention any such thing in either the article for blacklisting nor in the disambiguation for the word blacklist.

There is also this quora answer from an apparent Yale linguist specifically saying blacklist does not have racial origins, mentioning other phrases like "black sheep" that are only racial in inference, not especially in implication.

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-term-blacklist-racist

I also disagree that microaggression can be accidental, though I do think reflexive actions can betray racial attitudes. But that lies typically in instinctive actions like purse-clutching, not in formation of artistic or other creative devices like Stevenson's black spot, Tolkein's Black Gate, or the various incarnations of "black swan".

To reiterate, I am actually fine getting rid of the term blacklist given it's very negative history, but it's a stretch, and counterproductive, to racialize the term. That sort of overreach plays into the hands of people like Trump, who are not afraid of portraying these movements as unhinged.

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

#680

Post by Jedd »

chrismorgan wrote: post #480
Jedd wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually wouldn't mind if the URL bar was replaced with a breadcrumb bar on some sites ... Which sites? Anyway, almost everyone else would mind. Especially if there was no option to revert to normal behaviour. > It could then work like in Explorer in Windows 10, ... That sounds like the worst of both worlds. If people want Explorer in Windows 10 behaviour - can't they just run Explorer in Windows 10? If people wa…

Note this is talking about Explorer , more recently named File Explorer , rather than Internet Explorer , the browser.

Argh, of course. My mistake.

I typically run up breadcrumbkiller as part of any Microsoft Windows desktop build, so I rarely see that configuration for long.

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