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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

#681

Post by skissane »

ceejayoz wrote: post #674
skissane wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.

What is "boring" varies from person to person.

I know, when our son plays Minecraft Java Edition, he likes to play it with the debug screen (F3) on.

He doesn't understand what most of the details on that screen mean, although he is learning a few. (He was asking me to explain what X, Y and Z coordinates were.) But, even if he doesn't understand most of it, he still likes it, and probably sooner or later he'll ask me more questions about it.

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

#682

Post by shadowgovt »

zrm wrote: post #673
shadowgovt wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> the first thing that strikes you about ~juan-ramirez/financial-aid is that something is wrong because you are not Juan Ramirez

User studies indicate that the first thing a user notices is... Nothing. The gobbledygook in the path is so much noise for the average user that they don't notice if the path seems off. In fact, it makes sense to hide it from a security standpoint to decrease the odds that users go information blind to the domain, because we already know that improper domain routing to lookalike domains is, by far, the most common vector for credential theft.

There isn't even a guarantee that showing the path to address the 7% case (which really looks like more 0.07%) will on average cause the incidence of users being compromised to go down, if it means users are less likely to notice that the subdomain and domain are off.

I'm sure that for the people who really care, it won't take long to hack together a chrome extension that drops the full URL into the page title or a pop-up box on the page itself.

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

#683

Post by shadowgovt »

feanaro wrote: post #678
shadowgovt wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You can certainly vocalize something willfully. But the people who don't have to do any vocalization at all and are generating megabytes to gigabytes of data on how the application is used by their mere use of it are going to always have a default stronger voice than people who bother to show up on message boards to voice specific concerns.

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

#684

Post by humanrebar »

Kye wrote: post #408
humanrebar wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out the dogwhistle works for me and doesn't become guilt by association. It's also worth noting that some folks bothered by social justice movements are bothered by the qualities they share with fascist ones: thought crime, lack of due process, blacklisting, doublespeak, etc. It's possible actual allies againt oppression seem "evil adjacent" right now, but only because they aren't comfortable with fighting f…

That's reasonable. The thing that makes me wary of people like that also make me wary of some people on my "side." A lot of them use language and tactics to attack people deemed evil by their in-group that they would criticize if used by the out-group.

If I were to pick a single litmus test for rejecting a group or movement, outgrouping might be it. It's self-deluding, unprincipled, and easily turns hateful. If there's no path toward reconciliation or peace, what are the remaining outcomes? Utter dominance? Fizzling out? Segregation? I expect more.

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

#685

Post by stOneskull »

csmoak wrote: post #662
neycoda wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

if you click Downloads, it won't give the C:\Users\User\Downloads path, it'll just give Downloads.

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

#686

Post by biscotti »

biscotti wrote: post #395
polotics wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word! Frankly at this point I'm even starting to think that the whole weird "SJW" angle of this thread is also disingenuous and taking us away from the boiling frog death of the Internet, replaced by AMPed up centralized comoditization of users, with death to all liberty and openness.

I believe this too. In fact, I think the evidence is not only overwhelming but the tech community is thoroughly comprimised, proven so on account of all the recent purges and attacks on wrong-think. I no longer trust my software.

I don't know why I get downvoted for this when I wrote it based on the reality of the situation.

I guess some people just feel guilty/ashamed!

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

#687

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Mirioron wrote: post #498
kiwidrew wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, imagine if the browser vendors decided to _improve the usability of the URL bar_ instead of trying to remove it... The only difference between Example.com > Worldnews > 2020 > 06 > 14 > Big aquatic monster spotted outside Tokyo forum.example.com > Sport > Football > Spain > Real Madrid and https://example.com/worldnews/2020/06/14/big-aquatic-monster-spotted-outside-tokyo https://forum.example.com/sport/football/…

> And probably some clever logic to deal with the randomforum.php?fid=12345&tpcid=984.3&page=5 goop that is still all-too-common... :/ You say that as though websites like that are random small sites. HN has that kind of a URL, so do YouTube and Google.

Hacker News doesn't have breadcrumbs either. The concept of a directory hierarchy inherently doesn't fit.

You could try to map the parent ==> child relationship of every individual post URL, which might be cool, but think about how long the URLs would get.

For sites with breadcrumbs though, the URL absolutely should follow the crumbs (and I've argued for such at my company).

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

#688

Post by guug »

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.

Yep! Kids learn by observing.

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

#689

Post by propogandist »

dhms wrote: post #672
on_and_off wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome sends back your click 'behind the scenes', whereas Firefox does not, so Google forces you to click through their link so they can track your activity (and if you hit the back button, you also jump through their redirect)

Ublock Origin can block this behavior. Here's a posting with links to more resources on hyperlink-auditig

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#d...

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

#690

Post by takeda »

shadowgovt wrote: post #636
takeda wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a pretty big leap, especially since users can change Chrome's search engine. There are a couple of reasons they could be making this change highlighted in these threads.

It's the default, and most people who would change it (let's be honest, for privacy reasons) would switch to something like Firefox.
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