33 ms·

Burying the URL

• jatoo 12y ago
  You can still type a URL in when you want, just as easily as you ever could. You can still see the URL, presumably, by clicking the button. The only thing you can't do as easily is edit the current URL, which I rarely ever do. Calls that this will 'break the web' are hyperbolic. You can still click hyperlinks. That's what makes the web the web. URLs are untidy, even for technical users, and hiding them when not being entered won't hurt anyone.
• apike 12y ago
  It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".
  • bevacqua 12y ago
    Thank god.
  • mh- 12y ago
    'interesting' flags are usually tested with various segments.. so some people will see a flag set to a given value, others a different one.
    • eurleif 12y ago
      The post linked to by this post now says: >Update: As of version 36.0.1966.0 this has been removed. Iterate quickly!
  • jeswin 12y ago
    It may be gone for now, but someone who made this decision is still making decisions in that team. Honestly, I went OMG when I read the post. Dogfoodable Servo based browser arrives in Q4 this year according to https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Roadmap. Probably the most important project on the internet right now.
    • Widdershin 12y ago
      Awesome to see that target. I'm kind of tempted to start learning Rust so I can use and contribute to Servo when that day comes.
      • chrismorgan 12y ago
        You can actually use and contribute to Servo already—it just isn’t at the day‐to‐day browsing stage yet. That’s what’s meant by the Q4 goal.
• doctorpangloss 12y ago
  >Native apps, meanwhile, have been fairly dismal in terms of linkability, creating silos of content that have no sensical URL. It's a really excellent point. Conversely, you could argue that URLs are valuable to search engines as an indicator of relevance, organization and what can be crawled. Apps don't merely siloize their content—they break the most powerful way in recent history to decide if it's valuable.
• nevir 12y ago
  If you click the chip, it reveals the URL, too. May not be great, but it's not completely gone (which the article seems to indicate).
  • tehwebguy 12y ago
    Yeah and I'm sure CMD+L still works. Still, I can't imagine it will make web dev easier if the URL isn't always plainly visible.
• pixelcort 12y ago
  I wouldn't mind this if it had breadcrumbs. For example, http://example.com/path/to/file.html http://example.com/path/to/file.html would be four buttons (chips?) [example.com][path][to][file.html]
  • tempestn 12y ago
    The problem with that is that most of the buttons would take you to pages that don't exist. I guess the browser could crawl them first, but what would really be the point?
  • DougWebb 12y ago
    URLs are supposed to be atomic; there's no guarantee that truncating a url is going to lead you anyplace useful. The fact that it often does started as an accident of early implementations (hey, show a directory listing by default) followed by a security backfill (damn, directory is showing; better drop an index.html in there) which lead to a convention (better put something meaningful at each level of the url, because people will try them and we don't want 404 errors.) I don't think the convention can be assumed to be true for any website to the degree needed to implement a feature like you suggest. There would be too many errors when people click on those buttons, and people would blame the browser, not the website.
• tempestn 12y ago
  At first I was concerned by this, but as long as the URL is accessible - by clicking the domain chip - I could see this being a good thing. Most non power users never directly manipulate URLs, so there's no real need to display them so prominently. The domain on the other hand is important, and showing only it without the rest of the URL serves to significantly emphasize it. As long as there remains a power user toggle to show the full URL, seems like a positive change. Of course, I may be missing some edge case.
  • tempestn 12y ago
    I should clarify that I would want a power user option to actually turn this behaviour off, beyond the ability to just click to show the URL. Most users don't, but I glance up at the URL fairly frequently to orient myself.
  • _zen 12y ago
    From an IT support perspective, it could become a minor annoyance. It's not uncommon for support to request the URL or have the user manipulate it in some way. Now they have to instruct the user to click on a button to reveal the URL, but only after identifying if the user is using a browser or the version of Chrome that hides the URL. (And if IT is ignorant of this new feature, they are going to be very confused when the user is arguing with them "There is no URL in the box!")
• sosuke 12y ago
  This sounds a lot like AOL to me. No sense of the URL in there, just the keyword search. It was a big hit with the non-power users too if I remember correctly.
  • cbhl 12y ago
    Remember when TV ads would have AOL keywords in them?
    • rtpg 12y ago
      A lot of japanese ads just have a little search bar with the name of the company in it, instead of a URL.
    • alxndr 12y ago
      I have noticed ads with a Twitter or Facebook logo followed by the username or page URL to search for, always reminds me of AOL keywords.
• userbinator 12y ago
  I somewhat expected this, given the trend of where things seem to be heading with software these days. In the name of "usability" configuration is removed, UIs are "simplified", and gradually the choice and freedom of the user is degraded. Opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them, or to explore and discover, a chance for users to grow. Dumbing-down software only encourages more of the same. The "senior trying to use a computer" image is interesting in that it seems to imply that the seniors of the future will be just as clueless about how to use the Internet as the ones today, which may unfortunately not be far from the truth. I predict that eventually browsers will become almost unconfigurable, highly locked-down, and be less controllable by the user than a television. As the article notes, "the URL will [...] that many users will never even realize is clickable." From there, it's not hard to imagine at some point the decision to remove even that "clickableness", on the basis that "no one will bother to", and by that point the frog has been thoroughly cooked. Open-source or not, almost no one will have the will or knowledge (except the few elite) to modify them to make them work as they desire. Users can be more easily "herded" and persuaded, if they have little knowledge of how things work; just keep them consuming and complacent, because knowledge is power, and we don't want them to have too much of that. Appease and mollify them with eye candy and doublespeak. Welcome to the future of corporate control, mindless consumption, and fashionable ignorance. Sorry for the negativity, but this trend I find really unsettling.
  • mewks 12y ago
    You seem to assume that people are looking to learn and grow their computer abilities. Learning takes an open mind, which isn't the case for most people. Ease of use enables the user to perform actions with more impact. Think of it as Python vs C. You need a lot more knowledge to get started with C, but you can customize almost every aspect of your program. With Python, you lose some customizability, but you can do a lot more in a lot less time and understanding. If you need the customization and you have the knowledge, you can also build C extensions for Python (which would correspond to the chrome flags). I'm not saying I'm for this change or not. Testing it out on real users will decide its fate, I'm quite ambivalent about it. I'm just speaking for ease of use in general.
    • 12y ago
• amarcus 12y ago
  Wouldn't this make it that much easier to phish non-power users?
  • misterpib 12y ago
    I would think it would make it harder to phish. Since all you see is the domain name, it should be easier to tell if it's not the right one.
    • zacinbusiness 12y ago
      How?
      • jimbobimbo 12y ago
        Instead of seeing a very-very-very long URL that may contain legit words and pushing domain name out of the view, the user sees only the domain name. And if the user came to the Bank of America, but the domain is some hackedtravelagency.co.kr, it's more likely to ring bells.
        • zacinbusiness 12y ago
          But how observant are most people? www.halifaxbank.com vs www.halfaxbank.com for instance is a very minor difference. Remember that people misread things all the time, and the more comfortable they are with a string the less likely they are to actually read it.
      • aembleton 12y ago
        If I got a phishing email it might ask me to login to my Halifax Bank account and provide a link. This link could be to Halifax.com.sh.ly/login or some such thing. As an end user I might see the Halifax part of the url at the beginning of the address and feel comfortable entering my credentials. If this was hidden and all I saw was sh.ly then I'd know I was on the wrong website. You and I might be comfortable seeing that from the address bar right now but I expect 80% of users would struggle to see that.
• drivingmenuts 12y ago
  Every change like this makes me think we're getting further and further away from what the web was originally intended to be (and not in a good way). It seems like most of these changes come from some suited marketroid fresh out of a new paradigm meeting, rather than an actual honest-to-god engineer wondering what would make the web better.
  • spiritplumber 12y ago
    Looks like AOL keywords.... The web ate AOL, now AOL closed-model is resurfacing.
• Too 12y ago
  So now users are supposed to click the embedded +1 button to share a link instead of copy pasting the url into their chat network of choice. Actually I'm surprised this hasn't been built into any desktop browser or os yet as it is on android. Anyway, I think most people don't care about the URL looks like at all as long as you can link the page somehow, the recent rise of all URL shorteners kind of proves that, not exactly something I'm a fan of.
  • kalleboo 12y ago
    > Actually I'm surprised this hasn't been built into any desktop browser or os yet as it is on android. Safari in OS X Mavericks has Tweet/Facebook/etc https://www.apple.com/safari/images/overview_builtin_2x.jpg https://www.apple.com/safari/images/overview_builtin_2x.jpg
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • misterpib 12y ago
    It's funny though we did all these efforts to put URLs at the center of our APIs just to see Google hiding them from humans. Seriously. The amount of time I've spent making pretty URLs and now most people won't even see them.
• Swizec 12y ago
  As a power user, the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting and when developing web apps. I like to explicitly know what I'm copy pasting. It offends my personal sensibilities to make websites with ugly links. Other than that ... I don't know. I can't decide how I feel about this, but I can't help but think that I really don't care about the URL being accessible. Not like I ever do anything with it.
  • cgore 12y ago
    And that has got to be the most irritating thing about Google these days, they mangle the URLs in their search results to the point where I can't get a clean URL sometimes, at least not without some real work. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUniform_resource_locator&ei=1c1hU6v_Oqj32QWO-YCYCg&usg=AFQjCNFVKoOa_HlcuDeUu8wYS_g70me4Kw&sig2=v75CbZ4xQToPFkcVQfCntg&bvm=bv.65788261,d.b2I http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd... Instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator Is really irritating.
    • rasz_pl 12y ago
      http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300
    • userbinator 12y ago
      This is one of the cases where a userscript or filter proxy is really useful. There's some interesting cookie-looking values in those URL parameters too, not sure if there's anything privacy-critical in them but it's still a bit of a concern.
  • StefanKarpinski 12y ago
    > the only time I care about URL's is when copy-pasting This is like saying the only time I care about electricity is when I need to power something. The fact that there's a universal textual way to refer to and link everything – like via copy and paste – is precisely why the web is so powerful.
• apunic 12y ago
  The post implies that Google wants to get rid of URLs the core of the Internet but that's not true -- Google wants links, latest example is the possibility to deep link into any Android app via URLs.
• tszming 12y ago
  I worry it will be the same as last time they removed the http from the url: Users: Okay, you removed the http from the url by default, but can I have an option to disable it? Chrome: No, just accept it https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467
  • reidrac 12y ago
    It's funny that I have 6 open tabs right now and all them are https: so it its shown. After reading your comment I thought they had reverted that stupid decision, but they didn't :)
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• muaddirac 12y ago
  This idea (or at least, where this idea could lead) is actually a far more RESTful approach to the web. REST services should offer a single entry point - the root url - and the rest of a service's content should be navigated to through hypermedia affordances. The advantages are clear: the user never hits a broken page (theoretically) or finds that content has been relocated. The disadvantages are also clear: no more bookmarks, no more simple sharing. Hypermedia APIs attempt to address this problem to a degree with various forms of CURIEs[0]. It could be interesting to see a web based on that (imagine href="hn:threads:buying-the-url"). [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURIE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURIE
  • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    I think you are confusing discoverability with navigation. It's good if you can discover all content through hypermedia, but why should you prevent direct access?! It's like saying that there should be an indes in every book (yes!), and therefore you should not ever tell anyone on which page of the book they can find something relevant (wtf?).
    • muaddirac 12y ago
      > I think you are confusing discoverability with navigation. I'm not. I understand why it's hard to swallow though, because I think a valid criticism of the REST architectural style is that it removes bookmark-ability. > It's good if you can discover all content through hypermedia, but why should you prevent direct access?! Well, precisely because direct access implies that out-of-band knowledge is driving the interaction rather than hypermedia. I would refer you to Fielding's discussion of the topic[0] where he notes: > A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). > It's like saying that there should be an indes in every book (yes!), and therefore you should not ever tell anyone on which page of the book they can find something relevant (wtf?). Interacting with a web service/site is not like interacting with a book (or a physical address), because there is no permanence as there is with physical objects. Have you never tried to go to an old bookmark to find that the content has been moved (and you get a nice 404)? Anyway, I wasn't saying that this is all A Good Thing, just that the change in chrome doesn't seem at all at odds with REST (however, as many have pointed out, it can be at odds with usability) [0]:http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
• zaroth 12y ago
  Google heard of this thing called a 'Uniform Resource Locator', and thought, "Hey, that's us!"
  • zobzu 12y ago
    thats quite and insightful joke :)
  • diminish 12y ago
    If you closely watch Google quarterly financial reports and their search/content ad asset placements, you'll see that they are under tremendous pressure to monetize the web to show the investors they do a fraction of what is possible. Chrome UI updates often have traces of this pressure where search is favored against any other behavior to find information such as bookmarks, history, address bar. Removal of editable URLs will push a few percentage of address bar led traffic to to search.
    • bagels 12y ago
      This has to be one of the main motivating factors, to get more search traffic and thus ad clicks. If there's no way to enter urls, then all that's left is to search google.
  • gaurav_godhwani 12y ago
    Undoubtedly Google has become this for most of the world, but still importance of URL can't be ignored, specially if you build your own apps :)
• qwerty_asdf 12y ago
  I don't understand what "chip" means in this context? When did I miss the boat on all this "chip" business? A URL has a thing called a chip? What?
  • MichaelGG 12y ago
    I was confused too, I think they mean "small button" - you can click the box that says Amazon.com (in their screenshot) to get the URL textbox.
  • nevir 12y ago
    Chip is a UI term (that widget is a chip, names styled as blocks in a To: field are chips, etc)
    • userbinator 12y ago
      Is there a reason to use that though? From some quick Googling, I can't find any references to it. Also, there is already a term for a piece of a UI that you can click on to do something, one that doesn't have over a dozen other overloaded meanings (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chip http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chip ), and one that users would be far more familiar with: "button".
    • qwerty_asdf 12y ago
      Thanks! I've never heard that expression before. I'd be curious to know where it's usage comes from. It sounds like vague, new-school slang.
• dangayle 12y ago
  I want to swear so badly. Removing URLs?
  • CmonDev 12y ago
    Just a part of "open" web trend: prevent new languages being added and stick to legacy ones, prevent URLs editing - what's next?
• curiouscats 12y ago
  I think it is a horrible idea. I would guess they will allow me to adjust the view to always show the url in which case I don't care. It is just one in a super long list of very bad Ux decisions by Google in my opinion. If they actually don't let me see it, I'll just use some browser that does.
  • noodl 12y ago
    Based on this similar issue where the status bar's display of the URL under the cursor is obscured for a second or so, it seems unlikely this new "feature" would be configurable. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=59592 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=59592
    • userbinator 12y ago
      It appears that was introduced here, while "fixing" another bug: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1455 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1455 I don't quite understand all the concern with "width flicker", when the real problem is that important information is being hidden. Maybe they've always been attempting to deemphasise URLs, and thus are trying to divert attention away from that... (Comment 37 seems indicative of their general attitude: "we get to decide what you want, and you will like it.") There's an extension available to fix this, but it just feels terribly absurd that you have to use one to remove something that was deliberately introduced to slow down the browsing experience, on the browser that Google loves to advertise as being the fastest.
• carsongross 12y ago
  In the beginning was the URL, and the URL was with the web, and the URL was the web. Google has gone insane with mirror gazing.
• Yardlink 12y ago
  The extra bits of the URL absolutely should be hidden from the user. Whether this method and at this point in history is going to turn out well is a different story since there are still a lot of hackers that like to edits URL to work around other problems (eg fixing broken links, trying to navigate a confusing site). Nonetheless, the clear proof that it should be hidden is that you don't purposely display the URL or any other bits of computer code on your website or application. If Chrome ends up doing this, are you going to change the titles or first lines of your web pages to be the URLs? No, you're not, because almost none of your users want that.
  • userbinator 12y ago
    It's not just "bits of computer code". A URL is almost exactly like an address in the physical world. In fact, the reason that it's called an "address bar", and although the browser used to actually label it "Address" but that has - unfortunately - disappeared, is because that's precisely what it is.
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
      I think we should hide zip codes from users, those are just "computer codes", after all!11
• takatin 12y ago
  I have origin chip turned on since the day it landed on Canary and absolutely love it. Imagine you are running Sublime Text and forced to look at its source code as it is executing in a panel on the side. Imagine loading up a webpage and Chrome opens DevTools with the DOM structure of the page with no option to close it away. While it can be argued that having a behind-the-scenes view gives you a heads-up if something shady is being attempted, for a large portion of use cases this design choice would be clunky and annoying. I see URLs the same way. Once I hit a URL just load the page ( analogous to compiling the source code) and show me the content (finished executable). Origin chip does just that - the gritty entrails are hidden, but accessible, if necessary, with a click.
• theanirudh 12y ago
  Most normal users don't understand what URLs are, so I don't think this is a bad thing. This actually makes the UI more consistent; the address bar is always a way to search or go to a URL. An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.
  • ekianjo 12y ago
    > Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs. That's quite convoluted, and makes people look retarded :P
    • theanirudh 12y ago
      That just goes to show that URLs are a layer of indirection that people just don't get. Screenshots/photos are easy: Im seeing something, if I send this, they see the same thing.
  • Crito 12y ago
    I don't see this change as doing anything but encouraging such behaviour. It really should not be encouraged; taken too far it would break the web.
  • Grue3 12y ago
    To be fair, a screenshot of a tweet likely takes less space and loads much faster than an actual link to tweet.
  • alxndr 12y ago
    A big part of that is probably how easy it is to take a screenshot and send it to someone. If that whole process is faster and easier than me figuring out how to find a link inside this tweet which I can then send to someone, I'm going to just go the screenshot route.
• zacinbusiness 12y ago
  When did people become so sensitive such that a URL is "ugly" or in some way unpleasant to look at? Do people really spend that much time with their eyes that high up in the window? And how is this more secure? I can't see the URL of the site I'm visiting...so that makes it more safe?
• bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  Don't be mislead into thinking this has anything to do with usability. Well, maybe it does, but that's not the driving force behind it. It's about obscuring the workings of the web for one reason only: advertising. Anybody who understands how the web works knows that advertising on it is a joke and can not ever work if the users have the tools and insight to trivially circumvent it. Google e.a. have been working very, very hard at obscuring the fabric of the web to stop people from doing that. Everything from killing RSS to gradually turning the browser into a dumb box is a part of that agenda.
• mingabunga 12y ago
  That's why I use Firefox. I got sick of Chrome's inability to autocomplete url's I'd visited and instead sending me to their search page. Now they want to remove it even more.
• whoismua 12y ago
  Who needs the URL when you can search Google (instead of remembering a site's name /url) and see some ads first. This is the real reason, not usability.
• ejain 12y ago
  Burying the URL makes it less likely that a beginner will ever advance to be a power user.
• pjmlp 12y ago
  This reminds me of a discussion with a university professor back in the mid-90's, when the Internet started to reach the common user. He was exactly doing a research in how to remove the URLs from the user view, without changing the HTTP protocol.
  • leoc 12y ago
    Wasn't the visible URL originally a Mosaic "innovation"? It doesn't seem to have been visible by default on WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb , or on Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise , though it does appear at the bottom of the screen in WP's ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW screenshot.
    • pjmlp 12y ago
      I always remember Netscape with it. In Portugal we only got to have access to the Web around 1994. Before that most of us could only afford BBS connections.
• vertis 12y ago
  Save the chil^H^H^H^H seniors.
• cpeterso 12y ago
  Chrome developer advocate Paul Irish says: this is terrible. From what I can tell only 6 people have been involved in this so far. Going to do my best to stop it. https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/461737936078123008 https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/461737936078123008
  • general_failure 12y ago
    Unnecessary powerplay from Paul. And leaking information which is outright insulting to the 6(?) involved. This is a bad reaction for a developer relations guy.
    • wwweston 12y ago
      Paul's words are pretty mild and don't reflect anywhere near as badly on those involved as the actual decision they made.
    • duncans 12y ago
      This is Paul's job: keep developers using Chrome as their primary/default browser to ensure sites run the best they can on Chrome.
• greggman 12y ago
  This may be the reason I stop using Chrome even though I was a member of the team for 5 years. I NEED TO EDIT URLs. I need to copy and paste URLs. It was already annoying enough with it's removing of the protocol because sometimes I make a typo, try to edit it and it messes up and removes the protocol forcing me to edit it a 3rd time only after it goes as searches for something. Even as just a user I copy and paste URLs all day long. Into FB, into Twitter, into stackoverflow answers, into HN responses. I don't even see how this is better for Google. Links make up pagerank no? Links are what Google uses to be the best search engine. How is making it harder for people to copy and paste URLs good for Google? I'm sure I'm in the minority as a semi-webdev but dammit, don't fix what isn't broken. Or at least give those of us with different use cases a way to get shit done without getting in our way. Sure, this may or may not be better for my grandma but it's not for me. I causes me frustration daily already. This is only going to make it anger inducing.
  • frozenport 12y ago
    Also gramma is gonna be sad when I give her a URL and she won't know where it goes. It is not clear if they are dumbing the web down for users or just to get people onto Google search.
    • bagels 12y ago
      There's already a usability problem with the address bar: Many people use it to search google instead of entering urls.
      • saraid216 12y ago
        I've never understood the claim that the omnibar was a usability problem. It's really only a problem if you have an ideological issue with preferring to search Google... which isn't a usability issue.
        • bagels 12y ago
          It is confusing because there are these other things (urls) you could put in to the address bar that cause something different to happen from searching google.
• kijin 12y ago
  Yesterday, there was a large thread on HN about why Firefox so stubbornly keeps the search box separate from the URL bar by default [1]. I think we found the answer. Chrome now looks like a half-burnt Firefox, with an emaciated URL in a separate box from what has effectively become a search bar. The same two boxes are there, only their sizes are reversed -- accurately reflecting the respective vendors' priorities. Expect Google to make more changes along the same line. What, did you really think they were funding Chrome out of a kindness of heart? Now that Chrome is a leading (if not the leading) browser, it's time to make some money. Google is the new Microsoft. They have the power to change the web as it sees fit, but instead of safeguarding the open web, they'll try to replace it with a walled garden. After all, what good is a browser if people use it to visit URLs that don't begin with google.com? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7666688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7666688
• logicallee 12y ago
  (This has now been removed, according to an update by the author.) The fundamental idea isn't all that bad. But look, even in the 300px image you still have room to show more: http://i1.wp.com/garybacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Screen-Shot-2014-04-30-at-10.17.21-AM.png?resize=300%2C109 http://i1.wp.com/garybacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Sc... le. So while I know I want to enter a new URL or search about 20x as often as I want to edit or copy the current URL, and, therefore, I am fine with needing to click somewhere else to "view or edit" the URL (default being that the search becomes blanked) - on the other hand, no reason I shouldn't glance a the full URL by default. So I suggest that you show the URL in light grey and clicking makes the field clear, but berhaps the domain name could be darker, and clicking that part will meke the whole field editable/copyable etc. It's a subtle difference but it could work. I'm certainly glad they reverted.
  • leoc 12y ago
    If you want to see something useful in that empty space, the obvious thing to put there is the page title. (And you don't need to show the URL text at all to make it copyable.) User-visible URLs are a Bad Idea in general https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679423 . If you badly want to have the tree-structured site guide that people abuse path segments for, that can happily be implemented in some other way and displayed in the same space too.
• ripperdoc 12y ago
  Would be great to see a proposal for some next generation, semantic URLs that are more userfriendly (e.g. less machine friendly). With new TLDs, hashtags and search terms in ads the traditions are already being broken down. Why can't an URL be like a search string, just with some formal language behind it to make it standard?
• kukabynd 12y ago
  hope safari, firefox won't go this road
  • acheron 12y ago
    Agreed. On the concerning side, there's nothing Mozilla likes more than copying Chrome. On the hopeful side though, they have remained strong in the face of combined search+URL fields, so this may be one place they continue to resist.
  • userbinator 12y ago
    Nor IE... as much as it gets all the hate for its rendering quirks, it is also the browser whose UI has changed the least, relatively speaking.
  • themodelplumber 12y ago
    Doesn't iOS Safari already do this? You see only the domain name until you take some action to interact with that area at the top of the browser.
• allochthon 12y ago
  I would be upset to have to go through a search engine like Google's to get to sites. I will use a browser that makes it easy to get to the URL; Chrome is currently my favorite, but I would consider switching to FF or Opera if the links went away, simply because I use them for so many things. I wouldn't mind if all links were the kind that you see in shortening services, though.
• underdown 12y ago
  The yandex (chrome) browser has been doing this for some time now. I switched back to chrome because of this feature. /sadface
• paulirish 12y ago
  This is a new UI experiment that's deployed to a small fraction of users. We're looking at a few key metrics to see if this change is a net positive for Chrome users. (I imagine it may help defend against phishing). My personal opinion is that it's a very bad change and runs anti-thetical to Chrome's goals. I hope the data backs that up as well. But regardless, this change is far from shipping as the new default behavior and the reaction here will certainly have an impact on the feature's future. As mentioned, please feel free to disable it at chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox
  • nanidin 12y ago
    Genuinely curious, what kind of metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of a change like this?
    • ZoF 12y ago
      I'm curious as well, specifically how would you go about tailoring those metrics to different features as they're released. Seems like that could be a pretty awesome/multi-faceted question to see the raw data behind. That said, I sincerely hope that this particular anti-pattern's efficacy in converting people from typing in URL's to searching for websites isn't the most important metric.
    • joosters 12y ago
      This seems to hint that Chrome reports its settings back to Google, so they could discover how many people disabled the feature. Is this true? Does Chrome phone-home with details of user settings?
      • StavrosK 12y ago
        Yes, it asks you when you first run it.
        • RegW 12y ago
          Hmm, so I guess their stats are likely to be skewed. Being based on the choices of those that don't know or care how the web works.
• shacharz 12y ago
  Did they remove this feature? I've just updated my Canary and I don't see it. Update: Yup, it appears in the orginal blog post[1]. [1] http://garybacon.com/post/new-awesome-bar-in-googles-chrome-canary/ http://garybacon.com/post/new-awesome-bar-in-googles-chrome-...
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• Qantourisc 12y ago
  Here is an idea: stop using URL's that are waaaay to long. And make them more human readable.
• gcb0 12y ago
  And i thought i hated chrome enough from ridiculing me every time i tried to copy only the hostname Click url, it highlights the whole field, click again to remove undesired select all, now finally highlight the hostname, copy, paste on your ssh client and look like an ass for not noticing http was added to your clipboard out of freaking nowhere!
• brc 12y ago
  Save the URL! Phone numbers suck and are a usability nightmare. But people are used to them and everyone understands it. No URL - no decentralized web. I understand why Google wants to place itself as the key search and directory for the web. I remember AOL Keywords 'go to www.webvan.com, AOL keyword : webvan', the ads would say on the radio. But the web is just a bunch of content hooked together with URLs. Heck, websites are just a bunch of content hooked together with URLs. I already hate sites that are not linkable or discoverable due to excessive postback-ing and unbookmarkable deep results. I will always seek out a browser that displays the URL. There are ways to defeat phishing without obscuring the URL.
  • userbinator 12y ago
    The interesting thing about phone numbers is that they're not much longer than IP (IPv4) addresses; I wonder what it would be like if DNS either hadn't been invented, or was introduced only after the Internet had grown significantly. Would everyone have used IP addresses just as easily as they do domain names today? Then there's also physical addresses, which have been around even before phones, and from the point of view of computer science, they would be considered a horrible "ugly" mess, yet people also seem to have no problems dealing with them in their daily lives.
  • Houshalter 12y ago
    But the important thing is, how often do you manually type in URLs? The URL is still there if you need to modify it or copy it or manually typeit in, it just isn't displayed prominently at the top of the screen. What are you actually losing?
• anoncow 12y ago
  In this build, if I type in a well formed url, will it take me to google search results or the webpage the url was pointing to?
  • ajanuary 12y ago
    The url. The behavior of the box hasn't changed, just what it displays once a page is loaded.
• chacham15 12y ago
  Along with other people, I believe that the URL is engrained into a lot of what we do. Think of all the services that interact with urls: twitter, facebook, pinterest, stackoverflow, hacker news, gMail, etc. People might complain about the extra "meaningless cruft" after the domain, but psychologically it is what tells me that two pages are different. After a while of not seeing the full url, it becomes less apparent that the url contains state at all. That is not a good thing. All those services that people share URLs with become more confusing. All of a sudden, what you put into the box isnt where it goes. I realize that I have an anti-change bias, so lets look at the pros vs cons: pros - people know what site they are on, have a little more space in the user bar, cons - all of the above. Which do people care about more? Im betting the latter. Extra note: IMO, the solution to "cruft" is not "remove it", but rather, "make it readable".
• benaston 12y ago
  If Chrome stops displaying the URL, I will stop using it. Caveat: very small screen devices may justifiably need clever tricks surrounding the display of the URL to reduce screen usage.
• bagosm 12y ago
  This has nothing to do with a UI improvement. The change is just a way to force users to use the "share me" buttons so google can benefit by promoting G+ or controlling the flow any way it wants. Its a good way to keep track of user flow/spread of links whereas copy-pasting a link to an IM hides that information. In general this change doesnt have to do with bad UI good UI just pressure to use a more controlled web experience. URLs are good UI, they have extra info and the more experienced user can even manipulate them to everyone's benefit
• jacquesm 12y ago
  Bad move. A URL is a mental 'place' on the internet, you are somewhere and when you click a link you 'go' somewhere else. That feeling has been ingrained in the heads of the millions of users. Removing this will cause people to literally feel lost. The page does not currently tell you where you are, you already have that information and it is rightly 'out of band', there are matters of trust involved as well here.
• locusm 12y ago
  Update: As of version 36.0.1966.0 this has been removed. Iterate quickly!
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  This is a terrible idea. I understand from a product standpoint that anything technical is a hindrance on the user experience, but the web is nothing if not URLs. It'd be like taking the street addresses off houses and mailboxes simply because we had GPS now. Bad. Bad. And I don't even want to start down the evil empire road, but I have to bring up the fact that getting rid of URLs just continues to solidify Google's desire to control user behavior. Click/speak a search phrase, see a list, and go to where we tell you. The internet is just a series of back rooms to Google's front door. Don't do this, guys. I'm already half out the door with Chrome already. This would push me the rest of the way out and start making me actively tell people that Google is not looking out for their interests. I'm sure many other technical folks feel the same way.
• WWLink 12y ago
  From the description of it: I already fucking hate the feature. Moreso, I also hate the morons that make sites so heavily embedded in crappy javascript that you can't just copy the link and paste it in another window (or to someone else). Seriously? You're incompetent! Stop making websites like that!
  • 1stop 12y ago
    That's right, people should limit what culture they produce in order to make sure WWLink isn't upset. Alternatively, people can do what they like, and if linkable URLs are superior then things will trend that way anyway.
• sanityinc 12y ago
  Even regular users want to select & copy the URL, and paste it elsewhere. How to accomplish this task when the URL is a button is unclear (source: I showed the screenshots to my wife and asked her what she thought). For this reason alone, the change seems like a big usability fail.
  • hussong 12y ago
    But you're not supposed to paste the URL elsewhere, you're supposed to hit that share button to share the content on one service, and one service only! SCNR
• eyko 12y ago
  Hope this doesn't become a thing. URLs are the one thing that almost always works when you need orientation. "Where am I?". It's no good to tell me "you're in Amazon" if what I really mean is "what department". When reading blogs, the URL can sometimes also orient you in time, not just in (virtual) space - when the date in the path. The worst, though, seems to be that it has been removed for a very strange reason. It's not that the URL bar takes up precious space in the browser, since it has been replaced by a search bar that takes up the same space. It's also not that it's something that's disorienting or a distraction to the user - as far as I know, most users have been browsing with URLs present in their browsers since they every laid eyes on a browser. What's the reasoning behind it? Phishing? Yeah, sure...
• gettingreal 12y ago
  I like what chrome is doing with Canary Version 36.0.1951.0 If clicking the label reveals the longer version of the URL, and its still editable, then this could be really huge I think. I'll love to try it out.
• blueskin_ 12y ago
  Yet another user-hostile action from Google. How do people put up with Chrome? Firefox may be slowly rotting (cf: Australis), but Chrome is driving the destruction of usability.
• scottjad 12y ago
  If this change lands, then a couple minutes into helping someone fix their computer you now not only have to change Windows Explorer to show file extensions, but you also get to disable this.
• wil421 12y ago
  >Where previously typing “ruby” would send you to ruby.com and dump you on the Kay Jewelers site, now it directs you to ruby-lang.org by way of a Google results page. Of course this benefits Google, but it’s also better for users. Usability 1, URLs 0. I dont see this as a benefit to users, most people I know dont even have a concept of what programming languages are. If I were to say Ruby they would be thinking of the gem.
• z3t4 12y ago
  What is happening, but going so slow we do not notice it. Is that the www is merging with the application. What annoys me though, is that we still use "word", "excel" and PDF. Well not me, but everyone else seem to do it. The HTML was a good invention, but too bad so few people use it. Maybe hyper text sounds too old and and maybe a sexier name is all it needs to become popular again.
• sarreph 12y ago
  "to a tidy little button that many users will never even realize is clickable." -- Are you sure this is the case? The way UI design is moving currently, users have become more expectant of subtle cues (i.e. iOS 7). I would bet that someone who wanted the URL would click the URL-shortened button.
• Tomis02 12y ago
  > Six years ago, Chrome and Firefox enabled search in the location field. This goes to show that innovation is only what you can forcefully shove down your users' throats. Years before Chrome or Firefox even existed, Opera had this feature in 1998 by way of custom inline searches (e.g. type "g search this in Hoogle" in the address bar), and later defaulting to Google searches for non-urls. This didn't catch on until Mozilla and Google did it, just like most people don't buy into something until the "right" person tells them it's kosher. Software and hardware are practically fashion; outside of small minority groups that see the value of a product for themselves, you need to convince the majority through nice acts of salesmanship (making something look 'cool', or by simply using the 'take it or leave it' approach) to invest (time/will power/money) in something that will help them. /rant
• catwork 12y ago
  Part of Chrome's appeal is its as an IDE for web development. Technical support is also more difficult where an end user cannot easily locate a URL. Hiding URLs by default is going to detract from the value of Chrome for a technical audience.
• MildlySerious 12y ago
  I can't befriend with the idea that a company that is earning its money with advertisement is becoming the next abstraction layer on top of the internet.
• TerraHertz 12y ago
  Brilliant idea! And while we are going about removing unsightly, brain-straining details from every UI, let's remove all street signs, house numbers, highway exit signs, and so on. Also, hide all place names on all maps, Because who needs that complicated excessively detailed noise? Instead at any time we can just call one of the ubiquitous Google-taxis, and ask it to take us to the place we can vaguely describe by some approximate references. When we get there, if it wasn't where we wanted to go, well that was our fault for not being more specific. We should try the Google-taxi again. But it might take a while to be sure it wasn't where we wanted, since... no visible address! Seriously, this isn't just the stupidest browser-change idea ever. It's a deliberate move to dumb the net down and shift web functionality towards more total control by Google. You do realize Google censors search results, right? So if searching becomes the only way most people know to refer to/find a site, removing it from search engine results is equivalent to removing it from existence. This isn't about 'UI tidyness' at all, this is about dis-empowerment of users, ensuring that naive web users never become more aware of how it all works, and ultimately about Control. Personally I use full URLs all the time. I keep lists of article URLs in text files (like these: http://everist.org/archives/links/ http://everist.org/archives/links/ ) as well as saving articles because they may disappear. I often explore in sites by direct editing URLs. I demand to see full URLs on mouse hover, before clicking links. The 'hide/tidy the URL in the address bar' foolishness has been getting worse and worse for some time, and is a pain. Chopping the protocol off, graying out paths, shortening... I refuse to use a browser unless I can configure it to stop messing with the URL. No I don't want it animated, with bits appearing or disappearing depending on what I do. If you're complaining about superfluous visual detail, how is moving and changing the visible URL around all the time not worse than any static URL, no matter how long and machine-like? A static long URL I don't care about is fine, but if it _moves_ it demands attention. I can't believe the people pushing this actually expect to get away with hiding Universal Resource Locators from web users. Literally, taking down the street signs and expecting people to trust google and other search engines to faithfully perform the task of taking us to places we want to go, without ever trying to _influence_ where we actually end up going. Just like Google isn't trying trying to force fundamental and harmful browser functionality changes down our throats. Or coerce us all to joyfully become Google+ users. Or force everyone to use their real names in online forums, Or build Skynet for some reason (ref their ongoing purchases of every AI group they can.) Also, take that "It's OK, the URL is still available, it's just hidden way down in here" assurance and shove it. Same thing as UEFI secure boot - "It's OK, the ability to install some other OS is still there, you just have to thenyzzzt em-thup jksdfh!" How can you be so naive? It's a process, a series of planned steps, and after the nth little harmless step, the capability won't be there at all. Most people won't even remember it ever existed. All you people applauding this move... you've got to be kidding. Useful idiots perhaps? Or part of the choir. If this sounds negative, do you understand how negative I think the idea of hiding URLs sounds? I'm having great difficulty refraining from using offensive language. The concept deserves a large serving of it.
• charlieok 12y ago
  I have a compulsion to remove the unclean crap at the ends of urls that seem to be for somebody else's benefit besides my own. Query strings usually, with various tracking ids or unnecessary preferences. It bothers me when that stuff is there, and it is satisfying to remove it, although unpleasantly cumbersome. I wish people doing that stuff to urls would just stop. Let them just point to the resource.
• ape4 12y ago
  Without a URL its TV !
• jrochkind1 12y ago
  I work at an academic library in IT, among other things supporting users. Supporting them using a variety of local and third-party remote web apps, which integrate in some weird ways. Users reporting problems LOVE to send me screenshots. (Usually pasted into an MS Word document, yep). That's about the only reliable info I can get from users trying to report something they believe is a bug. At least when the screenshot includes the location bar, I can see what site they are actually on, and in many cases with some squinting actually recover the URL. It's gonna make support a lot harder when/if URLs stop appearing here. I have no idea how relevant this will be to anyone else, and it probably is not a good reason to leave URLs there, but, oh boy, it's gonna be rough. We'll have to actually try to train users in how to find and copy-paste the URL, which we haven't had too much luck doing even when it's in roughly the same place in every single browser; a future where we need different browser-specific instructions, so we first need to ask them what browser they are using, then tell them how to find and send the URL, at which point they've already moved on and no longer care about the 'bug' they found before.... ugh.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    You need a "REPORT PROBLEM" extension that pre-fills a form with things like URL etc, and asks the user to supply some information.
    • jrochkind1 12y ago
      Not a bad idea, but I'm not sure we have the capacity to develop and maintain such an extension for every browser (every possible browser anyway, not possible in some), and I'm not sure we could get users to install it.
• ancarda 12y ago
  It needs to work more like how Explorer works; Show many boxes but reveal the full path when clicked anywhere. To be honest, it would be nice if it displayed a box for each part of a URL: http://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Desktop-SATA-Drive-Green/dp/B008YAHW6I/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Desktop-SATA-Drive-Green/dp/B008Y... Turn into this: [amazon.co.uk] WD-Desktop-SATA-Drive-Green > dp > B008YAHW6I That would encourage cleaner URLs while exposing the whole thing (">" is just "/"). Perhaps an API could be created to tweak them a bit. I'm not entirely sure how to handle GET params though. A box for each parameter? One box with all of them? As for clicking the first box, it has to open up the panel that normally opens if you click on the padlock / paper so it's still one click to configure cookies / see certificates and not two. Right now I don't like the implementation as the URL is too hidden but I do like the idea; this will make it a bit harder to do phishing. Honestly, the old approach was the right idea too; dim the rest of the URL so it's more prominent what domain you are on.
• Grue3 12y ago
  Crap, I don't use Chrome (partly because of shit like this), but this means Firefox will soon steal this "genius" idea and make copying/editing urls a pain in the ass.
• DanBC 12y ago
  Discussing this article on HN is weird. Most people here miss the point which is "most users do weird incomprehensible things, and Google will tweak Chrome to be useful to most people, not to the tiny number of technologically competant users". Most people barely know what an URL is. See also the time Google removed the + operator from search. Hardly anyone used that operator, and it was used incorrectly most of the time. It's a shame that Google do not release their test data but it's obvious that they have a huge amount of user clicking and typing that they can analyse.
• ams6110 12y ago
  The original (stated) purpose of Chrome was to be a new competitor to force ALL browsers to get better. In that I think they succeeded. Now the purpose of Chrome seems to be as a data-collection and ad-delivery platform for Google. Admittedly, many folks navigate the web by google search already, but this is a step towards making that the ONLY way, at least if you're using Chrome.
• CalRobert 12y ago
  Is anyone surprised? Everyone was so quick to rush into Google's embrace, and is now surprised to reap what they hath sown. Please, at LEAST use Chromium, instead of Chrome, if you must use Webkit. The Webkit monoculture is have a strong negative impact on the web (try browsing in Firefox some time).
• moe 12y ago
  Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indeed indistinguishable from malice... You're treading on thin ice there, Google.
• Gobiel 12y ago
  Will we come to a "pay-to-hide-url" SSL certificate ? Kind of ridiculous imo.
• sscalia 12y ago
  Just further reinforces my opinion that Google Chrome is a Bad Browser™ Not "bad" in the sense of rendering or security holes (Read: IE6), but bad in that "experiments" can be "deployed" to users at any time, and a company with the aspergian-tendences of Google has control over that.
• sinned 12y ago
  Well, the location bar has always been one of Google's biggest competitors, which was pretty much won by Google after they integrated search. This is the next step...
• vitd 12y ago
  As someone who hasn't used Chrome, I couldn't even make sense of this phrase: "Enable origin chip in Omnibox". WTF does that mean? No non-technical user is going understand that gibberish. I think it speaks volumes about Google's take on usability.
• whatts 12y ago
  The question remains whether we (or rather you, the Chrome team) should leave such a decision to some "metrics". What has happened to smart decisions, bold moves and instinct?
• RyanMcGreal 12y ago
  We seem to be heading back to the days of AOL Keywords.
• rietta 12y ago
  I copy and paste URLS on a daily basis. What's not clear from the article is if that is going away or not. Is that what the 'button that most people will not notice' is? As for security, I can see benefit as most people cannot look at a deeply obfuscated malicious URL and see that it is not, in fact, their bank's website.
• poub 12y ago
  Actually teaching people the meaning of URL never been a big issue to me : they’ve always been able to understand easily by analogy with their home address that a page needs to live at a precise location. In fact even the naming of a file and the folder structure never been an issue to teach. Hidding an address does look like spam, not honest, cheating by design because the user doesn't know where s/he is without digging (clicking/taping once or more). As this information was there effortless, if it become an effort to find out, then people are not going to do it. One may think that information was therefore not needed on the first place. One may think twice and say : an information visible effortless might be needed because of its effortless nature. It’s there and part of the context we use things. By example it’s needed to reassure the usage of something. Why not starting to hide signs on the roads then. After all driverless cars don’t really need them and for everybody they distract the attention of the drivers.