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Burying the URL

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Re: Burying the URL

#151

Post by brc »

snewman wrote: post #72
quanticle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This should apply to computers. No, no, a thousand times no. What happened to cars - the replacement of mechanical, inspectable, (dare I say it) hackable components with electronic black boxes was not a good thing. You used to be able to fix and replace most things in an automobile engine with parts from the local auto shop and a shop manual. No longer. Now you have to spend hundreds or thousands to get the correct…

Old cars: you could fix it yourself. Modern cars: rarely need fixing; also much more efficient. I know which I prefer.

Every modern car becomes an old car.

It's fine if you want to turn over your vehicle every three years.

'Modern' cars are not fixable - even the specialists tear our their hair on some cases and give up completely.

Classics are rising steeply in value for people who want to own and understand a piece of machinery for its own sake. Much of modern automotive history will disappear into the maw of the crusher because irreplaceable, irrepairable parts render them useless.

Re: Burying the URL

#152

Post by brc »

colordrops wrote: post #66
jpatokal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 famil…

A car has a simple goal: get you from one place to another. A computer does not. It's a general purpose tool that is near infinite in scope and possibility. The analogy is a complete failure.

A car has that simple goal of A/B movement....for you. Plenty of other people want to hack with their general purpose mobility machine infinite in scope and possibility.

Re: Burying the URL

#153

Post by gcb0 »

rismay wrote: post #145
drgath wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I NEED TO EDIT URLs. I'm using Canary with this option enabled, and all you have to do is click the domain box, then you can freely view, edit, and copy the URL. All this update does is hide the path portion of the URL. That's it, so IMO, this story is way overblown. Google isn't removing the URL bar, they're just acknowledging the fact that 99% of users don't need to see 99% of the URLs they visit on a daily basis…

The only problem I see with this is the confusion between the search box and urls for most users. I noticed my 10 year old brother trying to find a song the other day in a peculiar fashion. He simply typed in youtube and "genre name." He click on the 2nd link of the search results. Then clicking on the 3rd item of a side bar linking to a playlist. He was navigating the web through links provided by google like we use…

you described the nefarious walled garden metaphor.

The holy grail of companies. Full control over 95% of the users by sacrificing 5...

you are just dead wrong thinking this is good design. obscenely profitable? Yes.

Good design is made by serving the extreme 5% while accommodating the 95... Take it from someone who actually majored in product design and usability. The rationale for user interfaces is that the 95% will at some tasks be the 5percentile, and if you don't serve them, over time you lose them. People think ios is a hallmark of usability only because the market has too much canon fodder so the 95percentile seems infinite. But eventually enough people will be fed up by being unable to send a file from one app to another the way they want. And will move to whatever crap interface that at least have a file system that allows them to compete the task.

Re: Burying the URL

#154

Post by ohwp »

greggman wrote: post #88

This may be the reason I stop using Chrome even though I was a member of the team for 5 years. I NEED TO EDIT URLs. I need to copy and paste URLs. It was already annoying enough with it's removing of the protocol because sometimes I make a typo, try to edit it and it messes up and removes the protocol forcing me to edit it a 3rd time only after it goes as searches for something. Even as just a user I copy and paste U…

As a developer I need to SEE the url as well. A lot of time I need to check get params. Also when hovering a link I need to see the full url in the status bar.

Re: Burying the URL

#155

Post by userbinator »

blablabla123 wrote: post #142
paulirish wrote: post #121

This is a new UI experiment that's deployed to a small fraction of users. We're looking at a few key metrics to see if this change is a net positive for Chrome users. (I imagine it may help defend against phishing). My personal opinion is that it's a very bad change and runs anti-thetical to Chrome's goals. I hope the data backs that up as well. But regardless, this change is far from shipping as the new default beha…

It's funny that people say not relying on URLs would be anti-web. IMHO this causation is made only on a selection of empirical observations. In fact I think, you could also draw other conclusions from empirical observations. Let's look at REST. Everybody is using it for HTTP APIs, or to be precise: everybody pretends to use it. Because, as many know, a REST API is only a true REST API, if it follows the HATEOAS parad…

but am I supposed to edit them as an end user or draw conclusions from their look?

Here is a data point that may be of interest: On YouTube, since links are filtered from comments, many users link to other videos by posting the "tails" of URLs - some with "watch?v=xxxxxxxx", some "?v=xxxxxxxx", and some just post the random-looking video ID part with nothing other than "see video xxxxxxxx". In other words, there's evidence to suggest that a reasonably large portion of the otherwise "computer-illiterate" have at least a basic understanding of how URLs work and will edit them manually to get what they want.

Edit: or to put it another way, there are people who, upon having made extensive use of YouTube (or possibly other sites), have been able to notice the patterns in all of its URLs, and use that knowledge to succinctly name a video, without explicitly giving the entire link. They are also implicitly teaching others about this knowledge in the process. This is a perfect example of the kind of learning experience that would be deprived from those whose browser hid the path in URLs.

Re: Burying the URL

#156

Post by joosters »

nanidin wrote: post #134
paulirish wrote: post #121

This is a new UI experiment that's deployed to a small fraction of users. We're looking at a few key metrics to see if this change is a net positive for Chrome users. (I imagine it may help defend against phishing). My personal opinion is that it's a very bad change and runs anti-thetical to Chrome's goals. I hope the data backs that up as well. But regardless, this change is far from shipping as the new default beha…

Genuinely curious, what kind of metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of a change like this?

This seems to hint that Chrome reports its settings back to Google, so they could discover how many people disabled the feature.

Is this true? Does Chrome phone-home with details of user settings?

Re: Burying the URL

#157

Post by wwweston »

jpatokal wrote: post #45
userbinator wrote: post #12

I 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 famil…

No one who is indifferent to URLs has had to pay much attention to them for most of the last 20 years. The UI change discussed here doesn't bring any positive change on that front.

Being able to attend to URLs offers significant utility to a portion of users, though, and this UI change takes that away.

You and your family don't want to think about URLs? Fine. Nobody's asking you to.

But they might ask you to apply that ostensible concern for other people's use patterns a little more broadly.

Re: Burying the URL

#158

Post by edanm »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #110
greggman wrote: post #88

This may be the reason I stop using Chrome even though I was a member of the team for 5 years. I NEED TO EDIT URLs. I need to copy and paste URLs. It was already annoying enough with it's removing of the protocol because sometimes I make a typo, try to edit it and it messes up and removes the protocol forcing me to edit it a 3rd time only after it goes as searches for something. Even as just a user I copy and paste U…

You can disable it by going to chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox, change it to Disabled and restart chrome. Edit: Apparently a useful comment offering a solution to the parent's comment is not HN worthy?

You shouldn't be downvoted, but please don't talk about being downvoted - it's against the site guidelines, mostly because it makes for boring conversations.

Thanks!

Re: Burying the URL

#160

Post by blablabla123 »

userbinator wrote: post #155
blablabla123 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that people say not relying on URLs would be anti-web. IMHO this causation is made only on a selection of empirical observations. In fact I think, you could also draw other conclusions from empirical observations. Let's look at REST. Everybody is using it for HTTP APIs, or to be precise: everybody pretends to use it. Because, as many know, a REST API is only a true REST API, if it follows the HATEOAS parad…

but am I supposed to edit them as an end user or draw conclusions from their look? Here is a data point that may be of interest: On YouTube, since links are filtered from comments, many users link to other videos by posting the "tails" of URLs - some with "watch?v=xxxxxxxx", some "?v=xxxxxxxx", and some just post the random-looking video ID part with nothing other than "see video xxxxxxxx". In other words, there's ev…

Yeah and the "otherwise computer-illiterate" may also think: oh wow, this is a cool feature I should rely on. Eventhough you can just paste the Youtube URL into the comment field and get a nicely formatted link.

For me this is another evidence that the main argument is broken. Youtube is super successful but in fact it is really restrictive when it comes to hyperlinking and mashing things together.

Update: just for clarification because of the downvotes, Youtube does not filter Youtube urls.

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