Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is great for security

There are also a surprising number of people that don't want to be literate. In the modern world, we have generally regarded such views as wrong. Basic literacy is such an important skill to have, we have even created various mandates to provide the necessary education to all children.

Technology has simply added a handful of additional details. Nobody is suggesting that every has to learn all the subtleties of URLs or read RFC 1738. Much like tuning the engine in a car, these are technical details safely left to experts.

Anybody who wishes to participate in this new, technology-filled world (i.e. ~"everybody") will need to make a few minor additions to their skill-set[1]. One of these is to know what a URL is, in concept, and be able to differentiate between the host-part and the path-part. Being able to parse the path/query-string is not necessary. The necessary skill is being able to recognize that "example.com/foo/bar/baz" is more specific than "example.com", or being able to guess that "example.com/2014/04/18/the-great-quux" is probably a specific article posted last month.

This skill is important to have to participate in the modern world, not just to use a "web browser". You see URLs everywhere. Many print ads now have a URL in them, for example. This is the new literacy, de facto.

[1] Other skills might include understanding that text shaped similar to "foo@example.com" is probably an email address, how to use a mouse, and what terms such as "password" or "login" mean.

My only possible objection is to observe that clearly some things are important/necessary to teach, others aren't, and all we're arguing about is which of these URL's fall into. Nobody here is (currently) arguing against such basic things as login's and passwords, or that "foo@example.com" should obviously to everyone be an email.

The reason I think URL's are over the line is because everything after the domain name is usually an implementation detail. Some sites will have "id=234234234", some sites will have complicated paths, some sites will have nice, readable URL's, and a large part of the difference is the specific framework or approach that the Web Devs decided to use. Do you really think it's important for people to understand the decisions behind this? That's over the line IMO.

Also, another knock against URL's being required is that, de facto, people don't understand URL's and seem to use the web just fine. That's because us selfless developers have been working hard to abstract away the issue from users. I think most users don't understand URL's, and this doesn't bother them in the least until you get to issues like phishing attacks. So all Chrome would be doing is recognizing an existing situation, and helping make it better.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that even the easy examples you mention, e.g. passwords, are something that most users don't really understand, and for exactly that reason, developers have been trying to get rid of passwords for many years. And IMO, one of the big benefits of Facebook is that it makes the "send a message to someone" game much easier than email for real users, so that's a knock against email.

I really don't think that understanding URL's is akin to being basically literate. I think the bar is much lower, and that we as developers forget just how much specialized knowledge we already know, and how much the average user already has in order to use a computer these days.

That said, it's a great analogy so thanks for bringing it up!

Most people have little idea what an URL is, nor how to use an address bar.

Watch a few people navigating to http://www.example.com/example.html to see what they do.

I personally have never understood the huge sums of money paid by some people for some URLs. I can't remember URLs; I can't remember keywords. What I can remember is some fragment of a page title, and I hope that's enough to find it in my bookmarks or in a websearch.

I wish Google would just release some numbers about the numbers of people who get this stuff wrong, because learning how many people use (correctly) the + operator made that change much easier to cope with.

I hated it. Not only for the reasons other people mention (it makes copying and pasting cognitively more difficult, and even after a week it didn't really get any easier) but also because I would argue that on sites with halfway-decent URLs, it's a navigation device. We already lost the title bar, and apparently the URL bar was acting as secondary indicator of what page I'm on. It was really, really disorienting.

I do wonder whether Google only planned to display the feature for a week, or if it got feedback from my navigation habits and disabled it. And what, if any, indicators they're using to measure success. (or at least non-failure)

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