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Whatever Google comes up with I'm pretty confident that I will disagree heavily with. URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no

Whatever Google comes up with I'm pretty confident that I will disagree heavily with. URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues. There is no need to fix something that is not broken. Thanks, but could you please stop trying to control the web Google?

edtechdev 8y ago
Get off https://my.lawn/ https://my.lawn/!
QuinnyPig 8y ago
Google knows better than anyone what the world should do—- just ask them. The arrogance coming off of this company is unreal at times.
ashelmire 8y ago
It does make sense to me to at least change the pattern to something like protocol://com/domain/subdomain/subdistinction/specificresource and standardize the way these interact with all the parts of the web.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I don't think it makes sense. Most languages read left to right. The thing I'm most concerned with is what specific site I'm on. If I'm on facebook.com, the most important thing to me is "facebook", not "com". So it seems natural to me for that to be on the left.
  - rauhl 8y ago
    The problem is that facebook.com.google-safe-pages.verizonmobile.evil-site.cn also displays the ‘facebook’ portion leftmost. Also, due to the way DNS works you really are trusting ICANN, then the com registrar, then facebook (CAs add an overlay, but then CAs like Let’s Encrypt ultimately trust … DNS). Making that explicit would probably be a good thing (and might even be a first step towards a rootless, decentralised future).
maxerickson 8y ago
It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users. From the Wired article Ars probably based their writeup on (Ars links it): "People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity."
- rauhl 8y ago
  > It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users. And one of their incentives in doing so is that Google is an alternative to URLs. Already many users Google ‘facebook’ and click on the first link rather than just typing ‘facebook.com’ (or ‘face’ TAB ENTER). Although I don’t believe I saw it in the article, it’s in Google’s interest to mediate all access to the Internet for consumers — this isn’t fundamentally different from Facebook’s VPN. It’s not in users’ interest, of course. If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately, maybe on different lines (with maybe colour used to distinguish HTTPs vice HTTP): news.ycombinator.com reply?id=…
  - acdha 8y ago
    > If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately They've tried experiments but it's not as easy as it might seem at first thought. Consider what happens with someone setting up a hostname like bankofamerica.secureuserportal.com or www.gmail.personaluserinbox.biz – a fair number of people will look at the left part rather than reading from the right so even displaying it separately won't help, especially if they don't have a huge window with tons of room and all they see is the first part of "www.bankofamerica.comsecurecardholderservices.ru". Only displaying the domain name will help with that problem but it has usability issues for any company which handles user data under subdomains since it'd be harder to tell user1.example.com from user2.example.com if there's any possibility of spoofing.
macintux 8y ago
> URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues. I strongly disagree. I do tend to think that they're useful and not obviously replaceable, but claiming they have no issues is dubious. Spoofing, with or without the added level of sophisticated enabled by unicode. Special character handling (e.g. whitespace) is sometimes problematic. URL longevity is a real issue. Server-side security has been compromised in the past using "../" in URLs. I'm sure I could come up with more, and I imagine there's a "top 10 fallacies programmers believe about URLs" list out there that would provide more examples.
staticassertion 8y ago
Issues: punycode, similar-domain name squatting, SSRF/ generally parsing urls properly, parsing uniformly probably 100 others but this was just off the top of my head. Some of these they intend to deal with, some they do not.
zimbatm 8y ago
URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are. They don't have the time for learning what it means. If they want to access a website they will Google for it and click on the first result and don't look at the address bar. As a consequence of that they are easy phishing targets, just setup a domain that looks more or less legit and you're good. Unfortunately the easy solution to that seems to be more walled gardens. I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing Google-certified websites. Registering your website with the Google Search Console will start to become mandatory to appear in the top results. Or implement AMP. So I'm with you but I think it's important to understand that URLs are broken for most people. When you see a perfectly legible piece of text, their brain is automatically blurring it like some piece of flesh in a Japanese Hentai.
- krapp 8y ago
  >URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are. This is a truism, but I'm not certain it's true. Is there actual data to back this up? What definition of "normal" is being used here.. the average person using the internet, or non-technically trained people? The web has been around for decades now, and everyone including my nearly 70 year old mother uses it, and URLs have been pretty ubiquitous for a long time. Not knowing what a URL is seems about as likely as not knowing what a TV channel is, or that they have a bank account number. It seems more likely to me that normal people do know what they are, but find avoiding them to be more convenient than using them.

edtechdev 8y ago

Get off https://my.lawn/ https://my.lawn/!

QuinnyPig 8y ago

Google knows better than anyone what the world should do—- just ask them. The arrogance coming off of this company is unreal at times.

ashelmire 8y ago

It does make sense to me to at least change the pattern to something like protocol://com/domain/subdomain/subdistinction/specificresource and standardize the way these interact with all the parts of the web.

ams6110 8y ago
I don't think it makes sense. Most languages read left to right. The thing I'm most concerned with is what specific site I'm on. If I'm on facebook.com, the most important thing to me is "facebook", not "com". So it seems natural to me for that to be on the left.
- rauhl 8y ago
  The problem is that facebook.com.google-safe-pages.verizonmobile.evil-site.cn also displays the ‘facebook’ portion leftmost. Also, due to the way DNS works you really are trusting ICANN, then the com registrar, then facebook (CAs add an overlay, but then CAs like Let’s Encrypt ultimately trust … DNS). Making that explicit would probably be a good thing (and might even be a first step towards a rootless, decentralised future).

maxerickson 8y ago

It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users. From the Wired article Ars probably based their writeup on (Ars links it): "People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity."

rauhl 8y ago
> It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users. And one of their incentives in doing so is that Google is an alternative to URLs. Already many users Google ‘facebook’ and click on the first link rather than just typing ‘facebook.com’ (or ‘face’ TAB ENTER). Although I don’t believe I saw it in the article, it’s in Google’s interest to mediate all access to the Internet for consumers — this isn’t fundamentally different from Facebook’s VPN. It’s not in users’ interest, of course. If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately, maybe on different lines (with maybe colour used to distinguish HTTPs vice HTTP): news.ycombinator.com reply?id=…
- acdha 8y ago
  > If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately They've tried experiments but it's not as easy as it might seem at first thought. Consider what happens with someone setting up a hostname like bankofamerica.secureuserportal.com or www.gmail.personaluserinbox.biz – a fair number of people will look at the left part rather than reading from the right so even displaying it separately won't help, especially if they don't have a huge window with tons of room and all they see is the first part of "www.bankofamerica.comsecurecardholderservices.ru". Only displaying the domain name will help with that problem but it has usability issues for any company which handles user data under subdomains since it'd be harder to tell user1.example.com from user2.example.com if there's any possibility of spoofing.

macintux 8y ago

> URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues. I strongly disagree. I do tend to think that they're useful and not obviously replaceable, but claiming they have no issues is dubious. Spoofing, with or without the added level of sophisticated enabled by unicode. Special character handling (e.g. whitespace) is sometimes problematic. URL longevity is a real issue. Server-side security has been compromised in the past using "../" in URLs. I'm sure I could come up with more, and I imagine there's a "top 10 fallacies programmers believe about URLs" list out there that would provide more examples.

staticassertion 8y ago

Issues: punycode, similar-domain name squatting, SSRF/ generally parsing urls properly, parsing uniformly probably 100 others but this was just off the top of my head. Some of these they intend to deal with, some they do not.

zimbatm 8y ago

URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are. They don't have the time for learning what it means. If they want to access a website they will Google for it and click on the first result and don't look at the address bar. As a consequence of that they are easy phishing targets, just setup a domain that looks more or less legit and you're good. Unfortunately the easy solution to that seems to be more walled gardens. I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing Google-certified websites. Registering your website with the Google Search Console will start to become mandatory to appear in the top results. Or implement AMP. So I'm with you but I think it's important to understand that URLs are broken for most people. When you see a perfectly legible piece of text, their brain is automatically blurring it like some piece of flesh in a Japanese Hentai.

krapp 8y ago
>URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are. This is a truism, but I'm not certain it's true. Is there actual data to back this up? What definition of "normal" is being used here.. the average person using the internet, or non-technically trained people? The web has been around for decades now, and everyone including my nearly 70 year old mother uses it, and URLs have been pretty ubiquitous for a long time. Not knowing what a URL is seems about as likely as not knowing what a TV channel is, or that they have a bank account number. It seems more likely to me that normal people do know what they are, but find avoiding them to be more convenient than using them.