Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar • Hacker News Board

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

#721

Post by Drdrdrq » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

cancerSpreads wrote: post #459

AsyncAwait wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft doesn't have a browser today, it's just a repackaged Chrome supporting the same Blink monopoly. I am honestly surprised Firefox on Windows is slow for you. I don't personally use Windows, but many on here say it works well there since v57.

I have tried to fix this slow loading problem. Happening on 2 separate gaming laptops with SSDs. Maybe I don't know what to Google.

Try to DuckDuckGo "why is Firefox slow on Google sites" - or just try to guess the answer...

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

#722

Post by Drdrdrq » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

mantap wrote: post #675

AsyncAwait wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Blink is a fork of WebKit though. Firefox is the last big non-WebKit browser afaik.

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

#723

Post by megous » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #714

megous wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome doesn't respect DNS settings anyway. I have in my resolv.conf: search my.home And entering hostname of my server would just googles the hostname of my server, instead of trying a lookup and googling only afterwards (or never, I don't see why the browser should contact the owner just because I mistyped the url).

This point merits an explanation. The file /etc/resolv.conf is a configuration file for the `dns` NSS module used by the glibc resolver. Google's async DNS feature uses Chrome's own internal DNS resolver which doesn't call gethostname(). It would be incorrect for Chrome to parse this file and attempt to "respect" your settings because NSS is a series of black-box system-specific modules. If you removed the dns module…

Hmm, so does this mean /etc/hosts will no longer work either, etc.? That's handled by the same glibc function too.

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

#724

Post by zbentley » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

AsyncAwait wrote: post #570

shadowgovt wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU did great things for UNIX. It hasn't really demonstrated much utility in the user experience improvement space. The flow there, in general, appears to be that the big, closed source commercial interests devise new approaches for user interface operation and the open source community copies the ones that work. The only space I can name off the top of my head where my open-source architectures have outstripped Wind…

If you're taking casual computer experience, KDE's still way more customizable than any of the commercial desktop environments out there. Of course proprietary software has more funding to hire designers and such, but in terms of actual functionality, I'd contest your claim. If you're talking developer user experience, it's not even a race. The FLOSS ecosystem has a landslide lead here. In fact the whole point of WSL…

> If you're taking casual computer experience, KDE's still way more customizable than any of the commercial desktop environments out there

Customizability is orthogonal with out-of-the box UX, the original axis of comparison here. In fact, the two are often at odds.

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

#725

Post by zbentley » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #650

onion2k wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send your own events to Sentry. It's not just for exceptions.

How do you make an event for rending looks weird, or text is unreadable or ?

Have a "report issue" button which leverages Sentry's (or your own, or some other service's) metadata collection and sends a report to you.

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

#726

Post by m463 » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

qwertox wrote: post #416

butz wrote: post #62

While this might be useful for a casual user, hidden URLs are a huge problem for web developers. Asking for a screenshot from client is not enough, now I'll have to provide additional instructions how to copy/paste full URL when reporting issues. Not to mention all possible problems with misconfigured servers when www and www-less domains lead to same website, but some script refuses to work on one of those. While it…

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.

> Nothing has been won

google could make an amp-only web experience without dissent.

hide the URL bar

javascript -> webasm

hiding all this benefits data collection and advertising. Seems obvious to me.

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

#727

Post by feanaro » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 8:35 AM UTC

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…

I strongly disagree. Ordinary users I interact with either understand the basic concept of the URL or understand it after an initial explanation. It becomes empowering to them in ways I often do not anticipate.

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

#728

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

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.

It's odd that you mention how Chrome needs competition but also decry lack of features in other browsers. That is one of the ways they are attempting to monopolize the space.

The standards are meant to be agreed upon by several parties, including both Google and Mozilla. Google implements new features in order to control the way they work, instead of allowing input by all the parties involved. It's always faster for one company to just do whatever they want than for a group of organizations to come to an agreement on what to do. The slower way results in better and more equitable implementation for everyone though.

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

#729

Post by feanaro » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #707

feanaro wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree that if you are willing to ignore privacy concerns and a potentially large part of your userbase, then you can simply send megabytes to gigabytes of telemetry and pretend that is the best you could have done and that you have the best data. I'm simply saying that's not a good idea.

a) It's not a large part of the user base who switches off telemetry and they have the telemetry to know that b) for being "not a good idea", it's pretty much industry standard now for everything from business software to video games.

> a) It's not a large part of the user base who switches off telemetry and they have the telemetry to know that

So you're claiming that it is typical for software with telemetry support to ignore your choice and still send telemetry about you turning off telemetry? That sounds wrong, but I cannot say I investigated this deeply.

> b) for being "not a good idea", it's pretty much industry standard now for everything from business software to video games.

As I understood the discussion, we were in fact discussing whether this is a good idea and whether it makes sense, so I think it's fair game to comment on it. As for it being an industry standard, that sounds like an overgeneralization. It is certainly not typical of software I use.

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

#730

Post by neop1x » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

cancerSpreads wrote: post #394

AsyncAwait wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's still an option.

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.

Start Firefox in the Profile selector and try using a fresh new profile. Or start in safe mode. Some old, forgotten configuration or addons are sometimes the cause. For example a privacy-enhancing addon CleanURLs disables ETag functionality by default. So all sites using ETag for caching content won't be cached. Big loss.