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Burying the URL

allenpike.com

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Re: Burying the URL

#161

Post by falcor84 »

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…

A confession: I sometimes edit the gmail URLs by hand. In particular, I'm often using multiple google accounts and find that after restarting the browser (or something) a tab's account changes to something else than what I wanted. So I like having the option to just change the user id - the zero based integer in gmail URLs ("https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox"). Also, in other contexts, such as google sign in, this id appears as the authuser GET param.

Re: Burying the URL

#162

Post by anonymouz »

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…

Even if the URLs on HN or various newspapers are not very human friendly, at least one can copy and save them. How do you propose doing that without URLs?

Re: Burying the URL

#163

Post by StavrosK »

joosters wrote: post #156
nanidin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, it asks you when you first run it.

Re: Burying the URL

#164

Post by chacham15 »

Along with other people, I believe that the URL is engrained into a lot of what we do. Think of all the services that interact with urls: twitter, facebook, pinterest, stackoverflow, hacker news, gMail, etc. People might complain about the extra "meaningless cruft" after the domain, but psychologically it is what tells me that two pages are different. After a while of not seeing the full url, it becomes less apparent that the url contains state at all. That is not a good thing. All those services that people share URLs with become more confusing. All of a sudden, what you put into the box isnt where it goes.

I realize that I have an anti-change bias, so lets look at the pros vs cons: pros - people know what site they are on, have a little more space in the user bar, cons - all of the above. Which do people care about more? Im betting the latter.

Extra note: IMO, the solution to "cruft" is not "remove it", but rather, "make it readable".

Re: Burying the URL

#165

Post by benaston »

If Chrome stops displaying the URL, I will stop using it. Caveat: very small screen devices may justifiably need clever tricks surrounding the display of the URL to reduce screen usage.

Re: Burying the URL

#166

Post by wwweston »

drgath wrote: post #119
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…

> 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…

> 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.

While we're talking about things we don't need, let's include this change.

The fact is, for most of the last two decades we've already had a UI where users who don't care to attend to the URL don't have to, and users who care to notice can. What does this add? Nothing. But it does take away some legibility for people who care, and discoverability for people who might learn to.

99% of people using web browsers really get no cues from the path? Cite please. URLs aren't high tech any more than the address to your house is, and my observation is that even non-developers who are simply experienced browsers pick up cues -- even from barely legible URLs mostly meant to be parsed by machines. You don't have to be a programmer to observe that typing a string in takes you to a page, or that the string changes when the browser loads a change, and put together the address correlation until you start to understand what a URL is without even really thinking about it.

Or at least, you wouldn't have to be a programmer to learn to make that connection based off of simple observation skills if we kept the current model. If we move to this new hide-the-URL UI, probably you would (self-fulfilling prophesy!).

And sure, the web has lots of URLs that don't provide a lot of easily parsed cues. In the interest of being a little less selective, though, let's look at a few others:

http://ask.metafilter.com/261148/Give-up-financial-stability...

https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+of+the+web+powered+b...

http://blog.ebay.com/ebay-inc-earnings-q12014-twitter-sessio...

https://twitter.com/paul_irish/

http://www.allenpike.com/2014/burying-the-url/

Do people need to see these things? Nope. Can they derive utility from being able to see them? Yes. And they do.

Re: Burying the URL

#167

Post by sandeshd »

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…

I loved it in the start, but in development it's kind of frustration for me. Specially while doing API design you'll get frustrated easily.

Re: Burying the URL

#168

Post by DanBC »

saraid216 wrote: post #105
bagels wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already a usability problem with the address bar: Many people use it to search google instead of entering urls.

I've never understood the claim that the omnibar was a usability problem. It's really only a problem if you have an ideological issue with preferring to search Google... which isn't a usability issue.

Not so much a usability problem but a climate change nightmare.

All of those people entering partial URLs in the omnibox, causing a Google search, releasing CO2 is terrible when they could be using local bookmarks.

Re: Burying the URL

#169

Post by userbinator »

brc wrote: post #150

Save the URL! Phone numbers suck and are a usability nightmare. But people are used to them and everyone understands it. No URL - no decentralized web. I understand why Google wants to place itself as the key search and directory for the web. I remember AOL Keywords 'go to www.webvan.com, AOL keyword : webvan', the ads would say on the radio. But the web is just a bunch of content hooked together with URLs. Heck, web…

The interesting thing about phone numbers is that they're not much longer than IP (IPv4) addresses; I wonder what it would be like if DNS either hadn't been invented, or was introduced only after the Internet had grown significantly. Would everyone have used IP addresses just as easily as they do domain names today?

Then there's also physical addresses, which have been around even before phones, and from the point of view of computer science, they would be considered a horrible "ugly" mess, yet people also seem to have no problems dealing with them in their daily lives.

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