This sounds a lot like AOL to me. No sense of the URL in there, just the keyword search. It was a big hit with the non-power users too if I remember correctly.
Burying the URL
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Re: Burying the URL
#12I somewhat expected this, given the trend of where things seem to be heading with software these days. In the name of "usability" configuration is removed, UIs are "simplified", and gradually the choice and freedom of the user is degraded. Opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them, or to explore and discover, a chance for users to grow. Dumbing-down software only encourages more of the same.
The "senior trying to use a computer" image is interesting in that it seems to imply that the seniors of the future will be just as clueless about how to use the Internet as the ones today, which may unfortunately not be far from the truth.
I predict that eventually browsers will become almost unconfigurable, highly locked-down, and be less controllable by the user than a television. As the article notes, "the URL will [...] that many users will never even realize is clickable." From there, it's not hard to imagine at some point the decision to remove even that "clickableness", on the basis that "no one will bother to", and by that point the frog has been thoroughly cooked. Open-source or not, almost no one will have the will or knowledge (except the few elite) to modify them to make them work as they desire. Users can be more easily "herded" and persuaded, if they have little knowledge of how things work; just keep them consuming and complacent, because knowledge is power, and we don't want them to have too much of that. Appease and mollify them with eye candy and doublespeak. Welcome to the future of corporate control, mindless consumption, and fashionable ignorance.
Sorry for the negativity, but this trend I find really unsettling.
Re: Burying the URL
#13Wouldn't this make it that much easier to phish non-power users?
Re: Burying the URL
#14Every change like this makes me think we're getting further and further away from what the web was originally intended to be (and not in a good way).
It seems like most of these changes come from some suited marketroid fresh out of a new paradigm meeting, rather than an actual honest-to-god engineer wondering what would make the web better.
Re: Burying the URL
#15So now users are supposed to click the embedded +1 button to share a link instead of copy pasting the url into their chat network of choice. Actually I'm surprised this hasn't been built into any desktop browser or os yet as it is on android.
Anyway, I think most people don't care about the URL looks like at all as long as you can link the page somehow, the recent rise of all URL shorteners kind of proves that, not exactly something I'm a fan of.
Re: Burying the URL
#16It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".
'interesting' flags are usually tested with various segments.. so some people will see a flag set to a given value, others a different one.
The post linked to by this post now says:
>Update: As of version 36.0.1966.0 this has been removed. Iterate quickly!
Re: Burying the URL
#17[deleted]
Re: Burying the URL
#18Wouldn't this make it that much easier to phish non-power users?
I would think it would make it harder to phish. Since all you see is the domain name, it should be easier to tell if it's not the right one.
Re: Burying the URL
#19As a power user, the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting and when developing web apps.
I like to explicitly know what I'm copy pasting.
It offends my personal sensibilities to make websites with ugly links.
Other than that ... I don't know. I can't decide how I feel about this, but I can't help but think that I really don't care about the URL being accessible. Not like I ever do anything with it.
Re: Burying the URL
#20[deleted]
It's funny though we did all these efforts to put URLs at the center of our APIs just to see Google hiding them from humans.