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Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

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Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#261
post #227
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human Removing Url's is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. Take Stack Overflow for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-... The only thing you need to actually get to the question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536 , but they intentionally add an extra human readable section for laypeople. If google actual…

That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.

> That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.

It is indeed for humans. After all, the whole purpose of SEO is to show up on the 1st or 2nd SRP for web searches conducted by humans.

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#262
post #196
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried. Tab switching was - for me - horrible compared to Chrome (chrome:swipe down, swipe address bar down, select tab you want from carousel). I kept looking if i missed this obvious feature. I tried to live without it, but Firefox mobile's tab switching just turned out to be a deal breaker for me. If anyone had some tips: please!! I'd vastly prefer using FF on mobile.

This has been reworked in https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... . The URL bar is now at the bottom of the screen, including the tab switch button which is now always within reach of your thumb. On the other hand, I didn't have a problem with tapping the tab select button in the non-beta app, where it's in exactly the same position as it is in Chrome...

Oh how I hate the new Firefox experience on Android. I'll still use it because hey it's Firefox, but it's really eating me up...

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there are simply no good free browsers that are not Chromium-based or Firefox. It doesn't seem viable or worthwhile to write a web rendering engine from the ground up. We're heading rapidly towards a Blink/Webkit monoculture.

Why exclude FF? It’s good.

Currently. Though Mozilla is giving no clear plans on continuing the projects importance. If anything it seems Mozilla is planning for an eventual sunset. Hoping to have revenue alternatives for when Firefox is irrelevant and they stop supporting it.

Firing a team building a meaningful advancement in Firefox's tech stack is a big signal, imo.

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#265
post #227
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human Removing Url's is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. Take Stack Overflow for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-... The only thing you need to actually get to the question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536 , but they intentionally add an extra human readable section for laypeople. If google actual…

That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.

It's more complex than that. Google upweights it because text in the URL is assumed to be significant to the user. So it's a bit of both, really.

It would be a shame if URL text loses its SEO value because it's getting hidden. Slugs in the url are human-friendly and should be encouraged.

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#266

Remember folks, Apple has been doing this in Safari since 2014. And there's been zero uproar over it at all. I don't understand why people suddenly hate this just because it's Google. For most users, total focus on the domain name is a security feature . For 99% of users, what comes after the domain name might as well be gibberish. I mean, it is a majority of the time.

Google has been doing this since 2010 [0]. Weird strawman. 0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467

That’s only hiding the protocol part of the URL. Parent is referring hiding everything but the domain, which the article in question is about.

Weird strawman.

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've met very intelligent people who have zero understanding of computers: they have been trained to click certain icons to be able to reach google for a search. I'd be interested in data supporting either more or less fluency than we might expect - but you wont be able to do an online survey to get it :)

> I've met very intelligent people who have zero understanding of computers I'm curious - how do you reconcile thinking they're very intelligent with thinking that they're utterly unable to grasp the basic concepts of computing? And that, precisely, is my point: as an industry we'd rather tell ourselves that it's all so impossibly hard and beyond the grasp of the common person rather than admit that we just suck at e…

just because someone is good at one thing does not mean they are good at (or care to be good at) another thing. Can most people be educated on $BASIC_SUBJECT? For the most part, yes. Are they interested in doing so? In many cases, no.

Some examples off the top of my head:

A teacher I worked with who previously owned his own business literally thought the screen/monitor of a computer could watch him. Even after going over how computers work, he looked shifty at his computer. He was unconvinced.

A teacher I worked with could not, after multiple sessions of helping her, understand how to sort outlook mail.

A former boss (owned his own business, made great money, very smart) double clicked _everything_, even when single click would work. Was not interested in changing.

A doctor friend using his patient software - if anything went off script, he had to call in someone else to get him back to a known point.

A former math professor neighbor needed to regularly send out mailers. I helped him set up the most simple solution I could come up with for printing the mailing labels. "Here, open the internet, go to this site, log in, and click the save link. Open this other program, import that data. Load your printer and press print." He needed help. Every. Single. Time. While he said he understands that he pays AOL for internet, he said he does not know what that means (this was like 5 years ago, still using AOL?!). Tried to probe his knowledge and help fill gaps. Never happened. If his internet browser icon moved, he could not get on the internet.

I'm a reasonably smart guy. Don't ask me to fix your car. Or paint. I'll make a mess. Also, basic medical/biology goes in one ear and out the other.

My best friend (granted this was back in high school) could not spell "girl" (literally, "hey, how do you spell girl? Uh, girle?") or solve two step algebra equations. But he could rebuild an engine and identify the type of aircraft flying overhead by the sound the engine made. Mechanical genius. Fast forward a few years, and he found out he really likes geology. Suddenly, he is able to write coherent essays and solve advanced chemistry equations. Amazing what _interest_ in something can do.

Any reasonably intelligent person can be taught a lot as long as they are interested. Many people are just not interested in learning new things, especially when it comes to computers.

Now, on the complete flip side, a service clerk I was talking to two days ago likes to scan in 3d wood models, clean them up in vector based image software, move the files to autocad, and use a laser cutter to make the same models out of metal, and uses an older version of Premier to edit drone footage he captures. My mom figured out on her own how to spoof her user agent to access media that was not supposed to be available to her - but still thinks I hacked her phone via an old computer tower of hers that I was unable to fix.

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are going back to AOL days. That didn’t work out so well for AOL in the long run. It’s kind of crazy to me you can’t do marketing now without at least discussing Google and Facebook these days. Edit: at least you knew you were the customer with AOL and paid them with clear terms for access.

The only difference is that Google has endlessly more clout and depth than AOL and my fear is that where AOL failed, Google may succeed. With Firefox succumbing this week, this is pretty horrible. I’m not a Richard Stallman type, but I think it’s come to the point where if you have even the slightest pretense of being a “free web” person, using Chrome or a Chromium-based browser has become unconscionable. This compan…

I have this shell script as `chrome-new` in my path for testing in Chrome and the rare site that is broken in Firefox. It gives me a totally clean profile each time to minimize the amount of Google spying that goes on and reduce my tendency to use the browser for anything but the current task. Sadly despite --no-make-default-browser, it still asks me with an infobar every time I start it.

    #!/bin/sh
    test -e "$(which chromium)" && CHROME="chromium"
    test -e "$(which google-chrome)" && CHROME="google-chrome"
    test -e "$(which google-chrome-dev)" && CHROME="google-chrome-dev"
    TMPDIR=`mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX`
    $CHROME --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-make-default-browser "$@"
    rm -rf $TMPDIR

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#269
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage everyone to use Firefox on Android just for the one killer feature of being able to install the full desktop ublock origin plugin.

I tried. Tab switching was - for me - horrible compared to Chrome (chrome:swipe down, swipe address bar down, select tab you want from carousel). I kept looking if i missed this obvious feature. I tried to live without it, but Firefox mobile's tab switching just turned out to be a deal breaker for me. If anyone had some tips: please!! I'd vastly prefer using FF on mobile.

This is the problem with the whole industry right now.

How Google win - and they do it with many of their products - is that they bother to make their products just superior enough to the competition, that you basically have no choice but to use their product, unless you want a deliberately inferior experience.

It's not just Chrome vs. Firefox, which I'm very sad about. Another big example for me is on my iPhone. Google's GBoard is simply superior to anything else I've ever tried, and yet I know it's spying on absolutely everything I'm typing on the device (pre-encryption), at all times, and it even bullies me into staying online if I want the keyboard to work fully properly. (It's slower and the prediction stuff doesn't work half as well if I'm in flight mode for whatever reason.)

Re: Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86

#270
I’ve wondered why we continue to display URLs as painfully-long single lines of text. Tradition? Why is this helpful anymore? (e.g. On an iPhone it’s not easy to edit the end of a URL.)

If it’s so damn hard to display full URLs on one line, let’s display them on several lines (at least after tapping on them), broken on dots to wrap. Spaces aren’t valid in URLs anyway.

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