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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

#381

Post by joshuamorton »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #158
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…

The 24156986 is semantic though; the ids are assigned sequentially to submissions. Early submissions have tiny ids like 495. So they are at least as meaningful as bug tracker ID's or version numbers. Now, it is true that version numbers etc. could be more meaningful. Jeff Atwood wrote an old article about the "infinite version" in Chrome, where the version number basically doesn't matter until you're checking to see…

That's still not semantic though, hn isn't a linear log. It's a tree. Linking to comments by I'd isn't really useful

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

#382

Post by tialaramex »

IshKebab wrote: post #93
SifJar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the justification is that some people will think the website is legitimate if a legit hostname appears anywhere in the URL e.g. http://scamsite.com/microsoft.com/phish "looks" legit because it contains the string "microsoft.com" (and most "regular" users won't appreciate the different parts of a URL); under the new scheme, that would display only as "scamsite.com" and hopefully people are less likely to enter…

In my experience companies are pretty bad at always using their own domain even for legitimate things. I suspect it is because getting IT to do something like setting up a subdomain in any company I've worked in is virtually impossible, whereas buying a new domain is easy. So I think most users wouldn't think something like `microsoft-it-support.com` would be suspicious.

Yeah, this is very annoying. It's not every company, but it's enough different companies to be a problem.

PayPal (a company that more or less constantly moans about phishing) operated www.paypal-special.com which is a tremendously phishy-looking name, but it was a real PayPal site until they shut it down.

One nice side effect of WebAuthn binding credentials to a dnsName is that you can't change domain names without trashing all the credentials. It's mechanically impossible. So when yet another marketing genius wants customers to go to some-daft-marketing-idea.example instead of your-actual-website.example they can put fluff on that site if they want, but any sign-in or other credentials stuff will need to happen on your-actual-website.example anyway.

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

#383

Post by jsnell »

andrekandre wrote: post #374
untog wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even desktop Safari does this by default! And yet no one was outraged.

i think its because apple isnt trying to mitm your web browsing with some amp-style service (yet)

But Apple does blatantly MITM urls into their own proprietary walled garden! Just a few days ago there was a HN post about Safari On iOS 14 redirecting from certain articles to Apple News. It was, of course, quickly flagged away from the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24113056

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

#384

Post by Spivak »

benrbray wrote: post #370
anchpop wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person knows exactly what the "7384" means, they understand it as a number that uniquely identifies a house along that street

The average person knows that a URL is a string that (for all intents and purposes) uniquely identifies a web page on the internet. There are some cases, like with Facebook/Google/YouTube, where they add a bunch of tracking info onto the URL, obscuring which segments of the URL are optional vs. required. But I think that's exactly the point, isn't it? To make it a lot less noticeable when you're being tracked. This c…

I think the point is that outside of some big sites like Reddit with /r/ that over time the actual path has become completely meaningless and is just a site-specific chunk of data that sometimes happens to be a permalink useful to users but often is just a way for the site-operator to organize their stuff.

This whole thing is just a reflection of the trend that URLs just mean actual.user.path.domain.tld/server/route#client/route

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

#385

Post by riku_iki »

rsanek wrote: post #252
switch11 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed 100% Google revenue is slowly going down Only option for Google is to pretend Internet doesn't exist Anyone who is using Adwords or doing Search Engine Optimization look at what results look like It's 50% to 70% traffic being routed to Google remaining being routed mostly to people who pay a lot to Adwords * It's almost purely Pay to Play now in most of the lucrative areas

> Google revenue is slowly going down Perhaps you mean their revenue growth is slowing? Because they're actually seeing pretty healthy year-over-year revenue increases: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

they posted 2% decline in revenue in Q2 2020, which is not included into your graph.

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

#386

Post by Spivak »

untog wrote: post #275
avodonosov wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

item?id=24156986 is readable and meaningful

It isn’t meaningful. It’s effectively a pointer. Pointers point to meaningful data but mean nothing by themselves.

The only real use the path has left on a URL is as a permalink sometimes and for non-computer people it's not clear at all when it is and isn't. I've been sent to many "did I forget to get anything" texts with a link to somesite.com/cart.

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

#387

Post by 7786655 »

DrJaws wrote: post #297
walrus01 wrote: post #86

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.

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.

uBlock Origin can block a lot more things than a DNS-based blocker can. Some websites load ads from the same domains they load content from.

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

#388

Post by outworlder »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #239
pdmccormick wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a large number of layoffs at Mozilla, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 .

And strategic re-orientation as I understood it.

Given the caliber of the talent that was let go, this re-orientation sounds more like a lobotomy.

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

#389

Post by donmcronald »

est31 wrote: post #34
dessant wrote: post #19

When the final version is implemented in a couple of years you will no longer see any URL, that way it won't be as evident that most sites on the web will be loaded from Google. Google is also attacking this issue from a different perspective with Signed Exchanges [1][2], to fake the URL and ensure their success in becoming the gatekeepers of the internet. If you refuse to become a content provider for Google's visio…

Yeah the endgame would involve a play-store like 30% cut of any revenue, subscription, ads, anything. 30% cut from non-Google ad network revenue as well. At that point publishers won't have a choice any more because of the Chrome and Google search monopolies.

I think the easier version of that is AMP gets favored and AMP only serves Google ads. I never really thought of that being the endgame, but it makes a lot of sense now that you say it.

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

#390

Post by wwweston »

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…

> many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain.

I'd argue this confuses meaningful with degrees of legibility. And also that it ignores how certain significant margins of users do learn this stuff.

`item?id=24156986` is immediately meaningful at least at one level: you know at some level you're looking at a specific item resource under the domain news.ycombinator.com. Processing which one requires a lot more attention and you're probably not going to build up a mental directory of corresponding numbers with discussions, and so that particular meaning passes beyond the threshold of legibility, but that doesn't mean the number itself is meaningless, anyone who's made a habit of paying attention to URLs knows what it is, just not that final layer of correspondence.

And it is not just web developers who know this stuff. I've seen laypeople who are just longtime browser users who have a pretty good idea how URLs like these work, not because anyone formally taught them how paths and query strings are spec'd, but just because the affordance of the URL bar is there and they've seen enough URLs correlated with browsing behavior to learn it by observance/association. The same way most people pick up language itself.

The URL bar teaches some people who care to notice how URLs work, which makes URLs work better as a social tech. And it doesn't require anyone who doesn't care to do so.

We lose that if we remove it. It's not a small loss.

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