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.
Remember when TV ads would have AOL keywords in them?
Burying the URL
51–60 of 376 posts
Re: Burying the URL
#52Every 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.
Looks like AOL keywords....
The web ate AOL, now AOL closed-model is resurfacing.
Re: Burying the URL
#53Earlier 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…
if there was a keyboard shortcut for "put reference to current page on copypaste stack" I'd never click the URL at all
C-l (lower case L) to select the URL and then C-c to copy is one way to do this on many systems without without clicking anything.
Re: Burying the URL
#54The extra bits of the URL absolutely should be hidden from the user. Whether this method and at this point in history is going to turn out well is a different story since there are still a lot of hackers that like to edits URL to work around other problems (eg fixing broken links, trying to navigate a confusing site). Nonetheless, the clear proof that it should be hidden is that you don't purposely display the URL or any other bits of computer code on your website or application. If Chrome ends up doing this, are you going to change the titles or first lines of your web pages to be the URLs? No, you're not, because almost none of your users want that.
Re: Burying the URL
#55I have origin chip turned on since the day it landed on Canary and absolutely love it. Imagine you are running Sublime Text and forced to look at its source code as it is executing in a panel on the side. Imagine loading up a webpage and Chrome opens DevTools with the DOM structure of the page with no option to close it away. While it can be argued that having a behind-the-scenes view gives you a heads-up if something shady is being attempted, for a large portion of use cases this design choice would be clunky and annoying.
I see URLs the same way. Once I hit a URL just load the page ( analogous to compiling the source code) and show me the content (finished executable). Origin chip does just that - the gritty entrails are hidden, but accessible, if necessary, with a click.
Re: Burying the URL
#56Most normal users don't understand what URLs are, so I don't think this is a bad thing. This actually makes the UI more consistent; the address bar is always a way to search or go to a URL.
An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.
Re: Burying the URL
#57When did people become so sensitive such that a URL is "ugly" or in some way unpleasant to look at? Do people really spend that much time with their eyes that high up in the window? And how is this more secure? I can't see the URL of the site I'm visiting...so that makes it more safe?
Re: Burying the URL
#58Most normal users don't understand what URLs are, so I don't think this is a bad thing. This actually makes the UI more consistent; the address bar is always a way to search or go to a URL. An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep s…
> Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.
That's quite convoluted, and makes people look retarded :P
Re: Burying the URL
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we assume that most users do not know what a URL is then why can we assume that the information handed to them by an origin chip is any more useful to them?
Re: Burying the URL
#60Most normal users don't understand what URLs are, so I don't think this is a bad thing. This actually makes the UI more consistent; the address bar is always a way to search or go to a URL. An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep s…
> Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs. That's quite convoluted, and makes people look retarded :P
That just goes to show that URLs are a layer of indirection that people just don't get. Screenshots/photos are easy: Im seeing something, if I send this, they see the same thing.