Google heard of this thing called a 'Uniform Resource Locator', and thought, "Hey, that's us!"
thats quite and insightful joke :)
Burying the URL
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Re: Burying the URL
#42As 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.
Not like I ever do anything with it. Well that's nice, but some of us still have (e.g.) parents to help over the phone. Not to mention the address/URL/etc. field is an important part of computer literacy.
This change (just like the hiding the scheme part) affects everyone who copies links, which is something that almost everyone using the Internet has done at some point. It's just an extra click, but an unnecessary one.
Re: Burying the URL
#43Google heard of this thing called a 'Uniform Resource Locator', and thought, "Hey, that's us!"
If you closely watch Google quarterly financial reports and their search/content ad asset placements, you'll see that they are under tremendous pressure to monetize the web to show the investors they do a fraction of what is possible. Chrome UI updates often have traces of this pressure where search is favored against any other behavior to find information such as bookmarks, history, address bar.
Removal of editable URLs will push a few percentage of address bar led traffic to to search.
Re: Burying the URL
#44I don't understand what "chip" means in this context? When did I miss the boat on all this "chip" business? A URL has a thing called a chip? What?
I was confused too, I think they mean "small button" - you can click the box that says Amazon.com (in their screenshot) to get the URL textbox.
Re: Burying the URL
#45I 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 try…
For kicks, try replacing "software" with "automobiles" in your paragraph.
The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.
This should apply to computers. My family love their iPads and Macs, because they abstract away all the crap they don't care about in, in favor of letting them get stuff done. It's a form of reverse snobbery to insist that no, my grandmother actually should care deeply about whether she's searching via DNS or via Google, or that my preschooler needs to understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.
Re: Burying the URL
#46I think it is a horrible idea.
I would guess they will allow me to adjust the view to always show the url in which case I don't care. It is just one in a super long list of very bad Ux decisions by Google in my opinion. If they actually don't let me see it, I'll just use some browser that does.
Re: Burying the URL
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting This is like saying the only time I care about electricity is when I need to power something. The fact that there's a universal textual way to refer to and link everything – like via copy and paste – is precisely why the web is so powerful.
More like "the only time I care about electricity is when taking a battery from one device and putting it in another". If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL. The only reason I interact with it is because I want to share the page with someone specific (rather than using a spamming/sharing widget). But I…
I guess, but that seems far, far more ugly than the elegance of copy paste. Copy-paste doesn't require special implementation, or inter-app compatibility, or anything special or extra.
Why are moving away from powerful and flexible systems that allow us to consume and produce? Why is the trend so constantly towards sealed, black-box, consumption exclusive habits? It makes me so sad to see.
Re: Burying the URL
#48In the beginning was the URL, and the URL was with the web, and the URL was the web.
Google has gone insane with mirror gazing.
Re: Burying the URL
#49As 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.
What about when you buy something online or log in to a web site? Do you not check the url before you give out your credit card details and website passwords?
From the article it sounds like Chrome is replacing the URL (which is difficult for humans to parse) with an "origin chip" that contains just the domain name. This improves on the use case you point out.
Re: Burying the URL
#50I 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 try…
It's funny that decades on, we're just about to finally wrap back around to what most businesses tried to sell the masses as the initial web: a walled in, exclusively consumer ecosystem like AOL.
When forced on us we rejected it, but eventually we walk right into it of our own accord saying "it will be simpler this way."