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I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird cont

I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon. I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...

Arainach 7y ago
Right next to that copy icon is a pencil - the edit icon.
- jonny383 7y ago
  Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary? What was wrong with the text box that opened what you would expect - the box filled out with the url of the page you are on? In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary? Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
    - jonny383 7y ago
      The old version opened with the text fully selected. You could either type a query and overwrite the text, edit the url, or tap and hold to get... Low and behold, copy and share. The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
      - wffurr 7y ago
        So what you are saying is the most common actions, copy and share, were behind a confusing an easy to mess up long press gesture. A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.
        jonny383 7y ago
        I'm saying it operates as mobile users have learnt to use over the past decade (and how the rest of the OS UI works).
        wffurr 7y ago
        Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction. None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction. Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
        brokenmachine 7y ago
        Long press is fine, it's the autoselection of words that messes me up (on Android). I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid. Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid. Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Yes: you cannot DIRECTLY edit the URL in the navbar. Nor, for that matter, can you click, ctrl-A (yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth keyboard). Instead it's click, then Copy Icon. Utterly blinkered. Oddly: Incognito mode is not (yet) crippled in this manner. Don't get me started on pull-to-nuke-whatever-you'd-been-composing-or-losing-your-place-in-infernal-scroll
  - saghm 7y ago
    > yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth clipboard I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Yes, thanks, edited. For cross-device control, there's ... Synergy, I think: https://symless.com/synergy https://symless.com/synergy There's an Android client (I've no experience with it): https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/ On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.) You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke. It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      Logitech (and probably others) make wireless keyboards that let you copy/paste between different devices edit: I should mention that I think this requires drivers on the computer end, so probably won't on iOS/Android
      - efreak 7y ago
        Such a keyboard wouldn't need drivers if it's programmed in to send multiple keypresses--ctrl+[axcv] works on standard Android text inputs and selections, as do the shift, arrows, home, end, pgup/dn etc.
- userbinator 7y ago
  In other words, an obfuscation of functionality that clearly shows their attempts at behavioural conditioning.
  - clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
    More like- how often do you edit a URL in the bar on mobile? It's a pain in the ass.
    - harry8 7y ago
      Every single time someone im's me some url with a bunch of tracking garbage after the ?
      - rapnie 7y ago
        I don't use Chrome but you have tracking token stripper plugin: https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper
        thenewnewguy 7y ago
        I'll get right to installing that extension on Chrome for Android...
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      I do often enough.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      Not really. I do it regularly.
    - wruza 7y ago
      At this point one should question why it is pain in the ass, not how often does one edit it because it is. Browsers could easily show Notes.app-like editing window for a long urls. There is no reason to force it to be a one-liner, except that it is historical.
guerrilla 7y ago
It's really scary. And it's a shame Firefox is so slow on mobile...
- rapnie 7y ago
  This surprises me. It rocks for me on mobile (Android), esp. with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin installed its really fast
- input_sh 7y ago
  A complete re-do of Firefox on Android hit Nightly. It'll replace current version of Firefox (stable) in the first half of 2020. Judging by the current state, it'll arrive with no add-on support, which I honestly hope doesn't happen.
  - guerrilla 7y ago
    Thanks for letting me know. This is great news.
    - JeremyNT 7y ago
      Don't get too excited, it doesn't yet support add-ons like ublock origin...
      - guerrilla 7y ago
        Well that would be life-ruining. What's the alternative? (Somehow I didn't see the last sentence of what I was responding to.)
- dx034 7y ago
  Is it? At least on Android it's the same as Chrome for me with no addons enabled. With ublock origin, Firefox is much faster.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon. Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.
- userbinator 7y ago
  There is no other reason, than their desire to "herd" uesrs, why they could not have the additional options to share/copy and have it behave like any other edit control, i.e. you can tap the other icons to copy or share, and more importantly still start editing it without going an extra step.
  - codyb 7y ago
    That sounds annoying. This is like Slack forcing their WYSIWYG editor on me. Thankfully Apple hasn’t done this yet and the URL bar still acts very much as it should. But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
    - ibly31 7y ago
      Thankfully Slack backtracked and made that editor optional. I was pretty relieved after a few weeks of frustration
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Did their usage numbers show most people wanted to hand-edit the bar or just copy it? If the latter, the default behavior gets in the way of the critical path.
stevula 7y ago
It’s editable for me on iOS. I would probably stop using it if they removed the ability to manually edit the address bar.
- blondin 7y ago
  same. must be an android thing.
  - hu3 7y ago
    It is editable for me. Latest Chrome mobile running on Android 9.
GuB-42 7y ago
It is editable, you just need to use the pencil button. It is an unerstandable choice because it puts forward the most common uses of the address bar and still allows you to edit. I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field. For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dx034 7y ago
I'm actually a fan of this. I rarely edit URLs, mostly copy them to share. Before, that always needed several clicks. Now I have the option to directly copy/share/edit it. Editing is at most one click more, sharing and copying is much easier.

Arainach 7y ago

Right next to that copy icon is a pencil - the edit icon.

jonny383 7y ago
Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary? What was wrong with the text box that opened what you would expect - the box filled out with the url of the page you are on? In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Okay I didnt see that. But why is this necessary? Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
  - jonny383 7y ago
    The old version opened with the text fully selected. You could either type a query and overwrite the text, edit the url, or tap and hold to get... Low and behold, copy and share. The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
    - wffurr 7y ago
      So what you are saying is the most common actions, copy and share, were behind a confusing an easy to mess up long press gesture. A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.
      - jonny383 7y ago
        I'm saying it operates as mobile users have learnt to use over the past decade (and how the rest of the OS UI works).
        wffurr 7y ago
        Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction. None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction. Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
        brokenmachine 7y ago
        Long press is fine, it's the autoselection of words that messes me up (on Android). I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid. Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid. Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Yes: you cannot DIRECTLY edit the URL in the navbar. Nor, for that matter, can you click, ctrl-A (yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth keyboard). Instead it's click, then Copy Icon. Utterly blinkered. Oddly: Incognito mode is not (yet) crippled in this manner. Don't get me started on pull-to-nuke-whatever-you'd-been-composing-or-losing-your-place-in-infernal-scroll
- saghm 7y ago
  > yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth clipboard I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Yes, thanks, edited. For cross-device control, there's ... Synergy, I think: https://symless.com/synergy https://symless.com/synergy There's an Android client (I've no experience with it): https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/ On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.) You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke. It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Logitech (and probably others) make wireless keyboards that let you copy/paste between different devices edit: I should mention that I think this requires drivers on the computer end, so probably won't on iOS/Android
    - efreak 7y ago
      Such a keyboard wouldn't need drivers if it's programmed in to send multiple keypresses--ctrl+[axcv] works on standard Android text inputs and selections, as do the shift, arrows, home, end, pgup/dn etc.
userbinator 7y ago
In other words, an obfuscation of functionality that clearly shows their attempts at behavioural conditioning.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  More like- how often do you edit a URL in the bar on mobile? It's a pain in the ass.
  - harry8 7y ago
    Every single time someone im's me some url with a bunch of tracking garbage after the ?
    - rapnie 7y ago
      I don't use Chrome but you have tracking token stripper plugin: https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper
      - thenewnewguy 7y ago
        I'll get right to installing that extension on Chrome for Android...
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    I do often enough.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Not really. I do it regularly.
  - wruza 7y ago
    At this point one should question why it is pain in the ass, not how often does one edit it because it is. Browsers could easily show Notes.app-like editing window for a long urls. There is no reason to force it to be a one-liner, except that it is historical.

guerrilla 7y ago

It's really scary. And it's a shame Firefox is so slow on mobile...

rapnie 7y ago
This surprises me. It rocks for me on mobile (Android), esp. with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin installed its really fast
input_sh 7y ago
A complete re-do of Firefox on Android hit Nightly. It'll replace current version of Firefox (stable) in the first half of 2020. Judging by the current state, it'll arrive with no add-on support, which I honestly hope doesn't happen.
- guerrilla 7y ago
  Thanks for letting me know. This is great news.
  - JeremyNT 7y ago
    Don't get too excited, it doesn't yet support add-ons like ublock origin...
    - guerrilla 7y ago
      Well that would be life-ruining. What's the alternative? (Somehow I didn't see the last sentence of what I was responding to.)
dx034 7y ago
Is it? At least on Android it's the same as Chrome for me with no addons enabled. With ublock origin, Firefox is much faster.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon. Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.

userbinator 7y ago
There is no other reason, than their desire to "herd" uesrs, why they could not have the additional options to share/copy and have it behave like any other edit control, i.e. you can tap the other icons to copy or share, and more importantly still start editing it without going an extra step.
- codyb 7y ago
  That sounds annoying. This is like Slack forcing their WYSIWYG editor on me. Thankfully Apple hasn’t done this yet and the URL bar still acts very much as it should. But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
  - ibly31 7y ago
    Thankfully Slack backtracked and made that editor optional. I was pretty relieved after a few weeks of frustration
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Did their usage numbers show most people wanted to hand-edit the bar or just copy it? If the latter, the default behavior gets in the way of the critical path.

stevula 7y ago

It’s editable for me on iOS. I would probably stop using it if they removed the ability to manually edit the address bar.

blondin 7y ago
same. must be an android thing.
- hu3 7y ago
  It is editable for me. Latest Chrome mobile running on Android 9.

GuB-42 7y ago

It is editable, you just need to use the pencil button. It is an unerstandable choice because it puts forward the most common uses of the address bar and still allows you to edit. I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field. For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dx034 7y ago

I'm actually a fan of this. I rarely edit URLs, mostly copy them to share. Before, that always needed several clicks. Now I have the option to directly copy/share/edit it. Editing is at most one click more, sharing and copying is much easier.