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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

#291

Post by TeMPOraL »

scott_s wrote: post #107

Something I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. For an example, look at the top of this page. The only semantic meaning in the URL for this post is `news.ycombinator.com`. The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human. (But, of course, meaningful to HN's backend.) A lot of (most?) of the URLs on the web are not semantic . They're naked application look…

As an example of semantic URLs, think of Wikipedia articles (ironically, featured in the article). The URL tells you directly what you're reading about. Why is it useful to show it in full? Because page titles are no longer visible during usual browsing sessions - they're shown in tab headers, which means in practice, you only get to see a favicon and maybe a word of the title if you're not a tab hoarder. So once you've scrolled halfway through a large article, the URL bar serves as the indicator of what you're actually reading.

The same applies to news sites, magazines, blogs, Reddit, social media sites - which is quite likely the majority of browsing done by normal people.

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

#292

Post by avasthe »

snowwrestler wrote: post #134
avasthe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. But AMP was an initiative for speeding up the web.

AMP has done nothing for speeding up the web in general; in fact I know web properties that implemented AMP instead of focusing on core speed issues with their main site. It's also notable that AMP projects almost always originate in an SEO strategy, not engineering. Google was on the right track by including side speed as a signal in ranking. From Google's perspective, that became problematic because it started disp…

Yes. But AMP wouldn't have had much value if sites were fast enough, Google used that as an excuse or maybe a genuine strategy turned into a lock-in plan.

The hipster macbook pro webshit who doesn't know what O(n) means, and the jobsworth drone manager who couldn't see beyond quarterly profits don't have any rights to cry about AMP now. People like AMP pages as evident from many discussions, because they feel faster than the rest of the web.

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

#294

Post by jpttsn »

makecheck wrote: post #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.

Broken on ...dots? Not slashes?

Mysite.

Com/Index.

Html

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

#295

Post by kats »

They're just trying to prevent phishing. Remember when the DNC was hacked?

Employees at the DNC were linked to sites that looked exactly like the Google sign-in page, except that the URL was "myaccount.google.com-securitysettingpage.tk".

picture of the phishing website:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/189688/does-goo...

From interviews, it seems like there's two features Chrome developers are working on try to prevent these kinds of attacks. One is to hide the subdomain so that people can't make such tricky looking URLs. Another is feature to identify lookalike URLs and let users know about the anomaly.

sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/russian-ha...

https://p3isys.com/p3isys-tech-blog/153-podestahack

https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-kill-url-first-ste...

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

#296

Post by EarthLaunch »

thethethethe wrote: post #266
EarthLaunch wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough, thanks for the correction.

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

#297

Post by DrJaws »

walrus01 wrote: post #86
khaledh wrote: post #12

IMO this is the real reason why they're pushing hard towards this: However, it's also worth considering that making the web address less important, as this feature does, benefits Google as a company. Google's goal with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and similar technologies is to keep users on Google-hosted content as much as possible, and Chrome for Android already modifies the address bar on AMP pages to hide that…

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.

when you have blokada, ublock doesn't make much sense.

why block ads on a browser when you can do it on a system-wide level.

unless you need the vpn connection for work or something like that.

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

#298

Post by somuchlan »

khaledh wrote: post #12

IMO this is the real reason why they're pushing hard towards this: However, it's also worth considering that making the web address less important, as this feature does, benefits Google as a company. Google's goal with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and similar technologies is to keep users on Google-hosted content as much as possible, and Chrome for Android already modifies the address bar on AMP pages to hide that…

Reason number 368 why I've moved everything to Safari + DuckDuckGo. I still can't believe they won the suit with Genius and being caught poaching their content for their own representation

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

#299

Post by flyinghamster »

bitexploder wrote: post #114
raybb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you or anyone else have a video or screenshots of what you're talking about? Or is there a specific name of the product where AOL was doing this?

When dial up Internet was a thing, AOL was the leader in that universe. It was basically one of the earliest walled gardens out there. They had their own chat, email, etc. You accessed it all through their desktop client. You never had to leave the AOL application to experience "the internet". They of course were still providing general Internet access, so you could still fire up Netscape [and earlier browsers] and c…

To amplify that a bit, AOL started out as a pre-Internet online service, competing with the likes of Prodigy and Compuserve. It wasn't until 1993 ("Eternal September") that they opened up Internet access to their users.

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

#300

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

aftbit wrote: post #268
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That's awesome thanks for sharing.
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