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The URL move is more nuanced than that, no? If you look at how modern browsers decide what to show you in the address bar, they often try to show you the hard-t
by dan-robertson 4y ago
The URL move is more nuanced than that, no? If you look at how modern browsers decide what to show you in the address bar, they often try to show you the hard-to-fake bit instead of the whole url, so you see notreallygoogle.com instead of google.com.search.q.notreallygoogle.com or notreallygoogle.com/http://google.com http://google.com and similarly you’ll see the punycode if the browser thinks the domain name may be trying to look like another one with confusables.
I agree the email situation isn’t great but it is also more complicated: lots of legitimate companies send emails via third parties or otherwise want to put a name quite different from the email (e.g. mail chimp but also google docs comments appear to come from the commenter rather than some big id email address), so it isn‘t as simple as showing the full address only and users may learn to ignore the full address if it is fully of random-looking letters/digits. And email protocols complicate it further because there are ways in which the from field may not even match the actual sender, though that isn’t such a problem with gmail. I definitely do hope things will improve, however.
- XorNot 4y agoDomain names are just fundamentally displayed wrong - the left to right reading order doesn't prioritise the right information. "com.google" is what you need to see since it tells you who's really in charge of the content. Particularly on mobile where I'm writing this I currently can see at most "news.ycombinator.co..." in the address bar. Could be a lot after that, how would I know at a glance? Google and Mozilla could make substantial progress on this today by just showing an extra bit with the start of a domain name in right-to-left reading order.
- navjack27 4y agoEdge seems to be doing things right in that department. On my phone I see the whole URL and the lock indicating https.
- thiht 4y agoSame on Safari. If I add more subdomains, it still displays the label and the extension in priority, the additional subdomains are faded and hidden on the left. This seems sane to me.
- reddalo 4y agoSome time ago, I read an interview with Tim Berners-Lee (I can't find the interview anymore, though) in which he said that if he could go back in time, he would reverse the URLs, starting from the top-level domain. Just like newsgroup hierarchies.
- dan-robertson 4y agoI think this is how they worked in the olden days. But maybe I’m confusing domain names with some uucp thing. I think the names were reversed for email (maybe a false story though) so an email address would go from least significant part to most significant part, but this was pretty broken for urls as you had middle-significance to most then middle to least.
- darkerside 4y agoThis is a good point. It's become typical for companies to use different email sending domains. What we really should be doing is automating what I do when I get an email from a new domain that might be legit. Look up the DNS info so I can confirm it's the company they say they are.