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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

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy would work if Google was deliberately holding back new features on the web to favor its proprietary operating system but in fact the situation is pretty much the opposite. I also don't understand why everyone is up with pitchforks at Google on this when Apple did the same thing to URLs a while ago. I guess engineers are just as susceptible to groupthink as anyone else.

Most people don't use apple.

Apple is massively popular in the US. The last few projects I've worked on our users were 50% iOS Safari.

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

#692

Wow, this is epic scumbaggery. I still stick to Chrome because of all the syncing features it has across many of the devices I use, PC, Mobile, Mac and my own laptop. I remember at sometime in the past they hid URL query parameters by default, until the user clicked on the address bar. It's so obvious this move makes it harder for people to copy-paste links, which is a common practice, and moreover misleads people wh…

Firefox can sync between different devices too. More, you can even self-host your sync server if you want.

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

#693
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.

While title is ragebait for sure, Google intent to eliminate URL and replace it with "something better" was clearly stated more than year ago. This article tells us they didn't give up on their efforts.

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

#694

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.

If recent history with AMP has shown anything, it is that yes, we need to bring our pitchforks every time.

And also precisely because of AMP, this might be a very dangerous step towards blurring the lines between original and AMP pages.

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

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underlyin…

As someone who has worked on the front line of the fight against phishing and account takeover in the past, I can assure you and others that you're dead wrong. Making this change was a recommendation I made to the Chrome team years ago because the number of people who would reliably type in their username and password to a site hosted on hacked web servers (supershop.co.hk/account_login.php etc) was just so high. And when those accounts got hacked, scamming and sometimes even extortion would follow.

Your side view mirror metaphor is unfortunately not clear at all. The side view mirror is simple and performs its function correctly as designed. It can't really be improved without totally replacing it with something else like a camera. Now of course not everyone will use the URL bar even if it's redesigned to work correctly. But right now the bar is practically designed to look as intimidating and useless as possible.

Perhaps you're so used to parsing URLs in your head you don't realise it, but URLs are a baroque and absurd design that nobody without training could properly figure out. It's basically random bits of webapp memory and protocols splatted onto the screen in a large variety of different encodings. In a desktop app dumping RAM straight onto the screen would be considered a severe bug. On the web it's tolerated for no good reason beyond history.

To give just one example that has regularly confused people in the past: URLs are read left to right except for the domain name (the important part) which is read right to left. You don't stop reading a domain name at .com, you stop reading it at the third slash or possibly a colon, but that form is rare.

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

#696
post #673

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. 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 informat…

> User studies indicate that the first thing a user notices is... Nothing.

There are a thousand ways to screw up a user study, but one of the best ways to detect a screw up is if they say that users either always or never do something.

> 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.

Which is why it makes sense to highlight the domain. Make it a different color. Make it a bigger font size. That still doesn't require you to omit the rest of the URL.

> 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.

Except that the people who actually do that really are the 0.07% and you've still lost the 6.93% who would've noticed if you'd put it in front of them but aren't about actively change the default you gave them ahead of time.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 underlyin…

As someone who has worked on the front line of the fight against phishing and account takeover in the past, I can assure you and others that you're dead wrong. Making this change was a recommendation I made to the Chrome team years ago because the number of people who would reliably type in their username and password to a site hosted on hacked web servers (supershop.co.hk/account_login.php etc) was just so high. And…

As someone who has had to teach grumpy old high school teachers how to not fall for phishing and mitm attacks, I really can't see the problem here.

The way I used to teach was very simple and very effective: there are 3 parts to a URL - the first part tells you if the connection is secure, the second part tells you who you're connected to and the third part tells you where on that site you are. The first part needs to be httpS, the second part needs to be the site you're expecting and the third you can ignore. They're even shaded differently to make it easier to read. "If you're going to Google and the black part ends with anything but google.com, call IT" made sense to even the oldest and most reluctant people I've had to deal with. The problem was actually getting them to check every time and not forget.

It seems to me that this change will not help people without training, change nothing for people with training, and make sharing links even more confusing for everyone.

Are you saying someone is less likely to get phished on "supershop.co.hk" than on "http://supershop.co.hk/account_login.php", even where the http:// part is replaced with a red padlock and /... is grayed out?

I see only one real solution to phishing: don't let users type passwords manually. WebAuthN and password managers both automatically read the domain and won't try to authenticate on a domain that isn't a perfect match. I've had more success with that than any other anti-phishing measure I've tried deploying (history-based domain trust, explicit trust on first use popup, detecting unicode gaps and domains in credential fields...).

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

#698

Reading URLs is actually really hard - even for experts. This video covers the problems well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-wB1VY3Nrc This is bad for web security, since the registerable domain is the part you have to trust, but it's surprisingly difficult to figure out that part. However I feel a bit uneasy about this since URLs are important and tell you where you are on a website. I prefer Firefox's approach w…

Is this a parody comment?

The video points out things like: how do you spot an eTLD? There's .com, but what about .co.uk? .github.io? Do you know all the exceptions? There's basically a database of them and you just have to know them to correctly interpret the security origin of the domain.

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

#699
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.

Absolutely true, but well-meaning advice like "just use an adblocker" and "why not use a VPN" somehow doesn't quite cut it for me. Defaults matter.

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

#700
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