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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

#471

Post by emptyparadise »

bootlooped wrote: post #416
emptyparadise wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A layperson wouldn't know what the "7394" in "7394 Foobar Road" means or why "Foobar Road" is a road called "Foobar" but that does not mean we should give Google the right to eliminate street addresses. A URL is an address. All your mom needs to know is that if she goes to https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986 , she will end up at something and she will be able to come back to it later, that's what's useful a…

People type street addresses into forms all the time though. Of all the times people type in a web address, what percent of the time do you think they type in anything past the tld? 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it. I think that's what it comes down to: if you're just copying and pasting the whole thing, there is no…

> 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it.

Then the existence of the URL is still justified by giving the user something to paste. So what if the user doesn't know what every single part of the URL means? They know that this URL gets them to this page and that URL gets them to that page. It's visible cause and effect. Get rid of it and we end up with "magic" where copying "news.ycombinator.com" on one page will produce a different outcome from copying "news.ycombinator.com" on a different page. This is how it works on iOS today and I think that eventually, users who only interact with iOS devices will not know what to make of that.

Weo hide all complexity from non-technical users then winder why they don't understand the complexity that's still there underneath. I don't believe that we should continue doing that. If the problem with URLs is the URLs being long and scary, let's make websites with better and more readable URLs.

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

#472

Post by Corrado »

dgb23 wrote: post #316
badwolf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought when reading this was relief... For my mother. I've spent most of my adult life trying to teach my parents to look at the address bar to make sure they're on bankofamerica.com and not some random phishing domain. That kind of falls apart though when it's... bankofamerica.comm.phishingdom.com/{random filler}/bankofamerica/user/login HN users are fantastic at thinking all technologies should revolve ar…

The root domain is highlighted in FF. This must be enough for visual testing. If you want a more reliable approach then you need to work with a whitelist and clear warnings.

> The root domain is highlighted in FF. This must be enough for visual testing.

I've been using Firefox for years and never realized this. Looking up at the top of my browser, I can see that "ycombinator.com" is highlighted and the rest of the URL is a darker grey. To me, this seems like a good compromise; you still get the full URL but the important parts stand out a bit more.

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

#473

Post by emptyparadise »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #352
emptyparadise wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's entirely our industry's fault. After all, there are no files anymore, just cloud documents on remote websites.

I don't think dealing with files made people any more computer literate, nor is understanding the folder/file UI abstraction any more of a badge of tech literacy than understanding what "pull to refresh" might do on an iPhone. We like to overdramatize the importance of computer literacy because we take it for granted that computers are our livelihood, not some principled quest of self-betterment to understand the wor…

We failed by no longer giving anyone the ability or even the right to understand their tools. A computer is just a tool to get things done. It's perfectly reasonable that to a lot of people, it will remain this black box of magic they'll never understand. But now it's a black box to everyone, including non-technical people who cared enough to know more about their tools even if they weren't their primary interest.

It feels to me that tech will eventually hit a point where there's only two ways to interact with it. Either you're a "typical user" who has a glass orb you speak into and pray that it does what you ask without shattering to prevent tinkering, or you're a programmer who gets a command line and that's it.

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

#474

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

cheez wrote: post #405
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is a much more performant browser for actually rendering heavy pages.

I have 18 windows open in Firefox vs chromium that say otherwise. Why would I lie lol.

Chrome has a more responsive UI, but as for actually rendering and laying out pages, Firefox is usually much faster.

I've actually checked with both browsers open side-by-side while developing my own webapps.

What's worse, Chrome is super buggy and will often randomly crash on complex CSS or too many table rows, etc.

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

#475

Post by tim333 »

bootlooped wrote: post #197
avodonosov wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

item?id=24156986 is readable and meaningful

Not to laypeople. Most people have no idea what query params are, or even what part of the url the top level domain is. You can explain what they are easily, but it still wouldn't be useful to laypeople. What can my mom do with "item?id=24156986"? Outside of developing something that interfaces with HN, I don't know what I would do with that info either.

How is Hacker News item 24156986 that different from say Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire page 134? Even ordinary people can understand numbered things with info on.

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

#476

Post by asddubs »

themacguffinman wrote: post #456
andrekandre wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was, of course, quickly flagged away from the front page. what does that imply?

That the HN audience in aggregate has a hypocritically lower appetite and interest in Apple's web shenanigans, given that a moderator never identified anything actually wrong with the submission and given that Google would be crucified for a similar action in Chrome for Android.

i always thought it was kind of strange how apple somewhat gets a pass for still releasing it's browser according to basically the IE6 model and worse (since you can't even install competing engines)

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

#477

Post by rstuart4133 »

bootlooped wrote: post #197
avodonosov wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

item?id=24156986 is readable and meaningful

Not to laypeople. Most people have no idea what query params are, or even what part of the url the top level domain is. You can explain what they are easily, but it still wouldn't be useful to laypeople. What can my mom do with "item?id=24156986"? Outside of developing something that interfaces with HN, I don't know what I would do with that info either.

Funny, I actually can't thing of anyone under the age of 30, lay or otherwise, who hasn't figured out that odd looking string in the URL bar is the name of the web page. They then rapidly figure out if they want to share that web page with a friend, all they need to do is send them that string. I don't know how they've learnt that, but I'm guessing seeing it they are the top of on every web page must be a bit of a give away. If that doesn't give it away, they first time they have to copy and paste a URL it probably dawns on them.

Beyond that, just about everyone who has used ebay for a while only cottoned on to the item number being the magic thing that identifies an item for sale. Nothing remarkable in that of course as ebay has it everywhere, but then most go on to figure out that https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Bathroom-Acrylic-Free-Standing-B... and https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/254579100447 are the same thing.

Shorter version: you say people don't notice patterns when they see the same thing over and over again. I've don't think I've met anyone under 30 who doesn't. And once they've noticed, they then exploit the patterns to their own advantage.

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

#478

Post by coronadisaster »

hu3 wrote: post #426
coronadisaster wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folks seem to miss the fact that google chrome was a minor competitor initially it IE - and their focus on things like ... security ... helped them become absolutely dominant. Security is a very small factor, if a factor at all, for Chrome to have become dominant. The main reason is because they keep/kept pushing everyone to install Chrome when you visited https://google.com (by showing you a small popup window).

Do you have evidence? Because I remember trying Chrome and immediately switching because it was miles ahead. So did my friends. It was faster and had slicker UI. Nobody keeps using a shittier browser no matter how many times you shove it on their faces. Btw Chrome is still faster than Firefox for stuff that matters and often by a considerable amount: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...

I don't really have any evidence (hopefully Google will be required to release that evidence in a monopoly probe) besides what I recall from advertising but security certainly doesn't seem to be the primary factor. Speed certainly brought in a lot of users, but by the time Firefox caught up, I am not sure what the market share was (at first there was a huge difference in performance, I don't think that today's difference in performance is comparable).

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

#479

Post by MaxBarraclough »

donor20 wrote: post #459
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their focus on things like ... security ... helped them become absolutely dominant I don't think Chrome's security features had anything to do with its ascension. Chrome took off because it was fast and had a good UI (iirc it had the ability to drag a tab from one window to another, a while before other browsers did). The average user knows nothing of the security features of their browser.

It did in a domain I'm familiar with. I think they were the first to have separate processes for tabs (?) which you could really see add robustness - when flash could blow up your session etc you could much more easily close out the offending tab. They were stricter and more prompt in blocking things like activex controls, they'd remove features tabs would use to try to take control of your session or confuse you. Al…

There's no disagreement here. Chrome brought lots of good security enhancements, and raised the bar for other browsers, but security isn't the reason people made the switch.

Yes, Chrome was the first to do process-isolation. As for ActiveX, I believe that's generally only available through Internet Explorer (not Edge), I don't think Chrome ever supported it. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX#ActiveX_in_non-Interne...

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

#480

Post by teddyh »

hu3 wrote: post #237
teddyh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because they wouldn’t have gotten the deal renewed otherwise?

How does firing some of their brilliant tech staff helps them renew a deal to keep Google as default search on Firefox?

The theory is that Google might have required this of Mozilla as part of the deal, either officially or unofficially.
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