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, pin

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".