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".
I wouldn't mind this if it had breadcrumbs. For example, http://example.com/path/to/file.html would be four buttons (chips?) [example.com][path][to][file.html]
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?
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.
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!")
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.
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.
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.
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.
So much cynicism! My experience is that people do have an open mind, especially if encouraged to learn. With the trend towards turning computers into purely consumer appliances, the danger is that maybe most people won't even know there is something to learn.
Absolutely. And for those who don't, instead of making it easier for them to keep their minds closed, we should be encouraging them to open up.
Practically all developers started as users who got curious about something and wanted to learn. In some ways, the less information a UI exposes to them, the less inclined they will be to ask - because they don't have anything they can particularly ask about. I'm extremely opposed to hiding the default hiding of the URL scheme for this reason: users are far less likely to ask "what's HTTP?" Certainly many won't care, and to them it's "just another part of the website's name", but future developers are (or should be) the ones who do, so it potentially reduces the number of genuinely curious and inquisitive developers. At the same time it conditions them to think that such opaqueness is the norm, the way things should be when they write their own applications, and the vicious cycle repeats.
For kicks, try replacing "software" with "automobiles" in your paragraph.
The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.
This should apply to computers. My family love their iPads and Macs, because they abstract away all the crap they don't care about in, in favor of letting them get stuff done. It's a form of reverse snobbery to insist that no, my grandmother actually should care deeply about whether she's searching via DNS or via Google, or that my preschooler needs to understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.
No, no, a thousand times no. What happened to cars - the replacement of mechanical, inspectable, (dare I say it) hackable components with electronic black boxes was not a good thing. You used to be able to fix and replace most things in an automobile engine with parts from the local auto shop and a shop manual. No longer. Now you have to spend hundreds or thousands to get the correct electronic doohickeys to talk to the closed source, locked down, DRM'd to hell and back engine control modules. And many of the parts aren't repairable in any meaningful sense - you have to go to the dealership to get a new widget, and if your car is too old or too rare, you're just SOL and you have to buy a new car. If this is the world you want for software, I want no part of it.
> Modern cars: rarely need fixing; also much more efficient.
That really has nothing to do with what is being discussed though. The reliability and efficiency of modern cars are consequences of advances in technology and engineering, not user interface redesign.
Modern computers have also gotten... not more reliable exactly (they have, but it's not the point), but more robust against the need for manual configuration. When's the last time you had to defragment a disk, or figure out why some device in Windows Device Manager had a question mark next to it or what driver cocktail to install, or enter complicated settings to access the Internet? (Or XF86Config, for that matter...)
In other words, just like modern cars, it's not as necessary to pay attention to the innards for continued operation.
Is it some kind of a test? Why is knowing IRQ relevant?
I am joining many people here, who prefer having configurable tools. I do not want to configure 'IRQ' on any tool I use, but if it will misfunction, I will search for it and find out what IRQ means and how I adjust it to my needs. Worse, is being unable to change 'IRQ' when you need to, because people in charge decided it draws 95% customers away, and you are being in a 5% boat.
I don't think robustness has much to do with the need for manual configuration. Configuration is needed not (only) because users need to do troubleshooting, but also because they want to adjust and tweak their cars/computers/gadgets to their needs. The current trend is less configuration, less control in the hands of the consumer, more lock-down.
I believe hiding implementation details is part of this trend to reduce complexity (which is good) but also to wrestle control away from the user (which is bad).
A large chunk of the reason behind the efficiency in particular of newer cars is the addition of those opaque black boxes. Being able to have the car's engine directly tune things according to complicated algorithms, instead of power-hungry mechanical controls, etc, etc.
It's fine if you want to turn over your vehicle every three years.
'Modern' cars are not fixable - even the specialists tear our their hair on some cases and give up completely.
Classics are rising steeply in value for people who want to own and understand a piece of machinery for its own sake. Much of modern automotive history will disappear into the maw of the crusher because irreplaceable, irrepairable parts render them useless.
Are you implying that new cars rarely need fixing and are much more efficient because they are completely closed down and harder to work on than old cars?
The converse: advances in automotive engineering have made cars more reliable and efficient, with the unfortunate but tolerable side effect of making them internally more complex and inaccessible.
That's not a problem with abstraction, though, that's a problem with the manufacturers.
You can have complex, highly configurable software that's still locked down, and you can have simple, abstracted software that's open source. It's not a result of the simplification of UIs.
Usability is important, but so is the option to expose how something works under the hood to those that desire the knowledge. Computers are too important for humanity's progress to turn them into consumption-only appliances. Over-simplifying and locking everything down will deprive us of many future inventors.
A car has a simple goal: get you from one place to another. A computer does not. It's a general purpose tool that is near infinite in scope and possibility. The analogy is a complete failure.
For most people, "A to B" means getting stuff done, not hacking around with the system.
So they won't care about the technology stack, as long as that spreadsheet, text document, 3D image, .... can be edited, saved and printed or a game played.
Glad you put spreadsheet in that list. "Spreadsheet" is also programming, just one form of programming that by accident of history made it to "things users do".
A car has that simple goal of A/B movement....for you. Plenty of other people want to hack with their general purpose mobility machine infinite in scope and possibility.
I think the stakes are really higher with a computer than a car. We use computers to communicate and transact with others. It's a tool for us to learn and acquire skills, connect, trade in business etc. It has almost become an accessory for the human brain. So it's important that users remain in control of their devices, can learn how they work and not be dependent on a few chosen ones.
I don't know man, an elevator, escalator, and moving walkway, all have the same purpose of getting you from one place to another - a car is infinitely more capable than all of these and does a whole lot of other manoeuvring and functions (storage, transportation, etc), to the point of requiring actual education and in fact literal adulthood just to drive. To say nothing of all the other functions in a car from radio to full electrical system, towing, etc.
You can call the function of a car "simple" and a computer infinite in scope, but a twelve year old is allowed to use the latter but not the former. This implies the scope (for mischief) is in some sense far narrower with the computer...
I do get what you're saying of course. But I feel like in the past decade or so we've moved past the car analogy :)
I remember talking to a friend who owns a Mercedes recently and he was telling me how he had to take his car into the shop and they gave him a fancy loaner (an ML 63, IIRC). He talked about all the cool gadgetry in there like blind-spot monitors, side rear view mirror wipers, and such.
He also mentioned that the cars are pretty much impossible to work on on your own since you need to have the right diagnostic equipment, as opposed to a car one might have bought 15-20 years ago, where a good manual was all that you needed to get into the thick of it.
While I agree that knowledge of the inner functioning should not be required for using a product, I think that it would be nice if there was some sort of effort made to allow one to poke inside. I am guessing that with Chrome there will be some sort of setting that you can use to undo this change (I use Firefox, and rarely, but occasionally, use the about:config tool).
This concept is something I've been playing out in my mind and that I'm starting to explore in my programming. A simple interface that "doesn't make me think" (me being the user), and a well-tucked-away "Advanced" button that, having given the proper warnings, allows the user to poke around on the inside.
> and a well-tucked-away "Advanced" button that, having given the proper warnings, allows the user to poke around on the inside.
I simply don't understand that this point, which is bloody obvious, is completely lost on the so many UI (re)designers. I don't mind you simplify (and most of the time thats all we need) but what is the point behind cutting-off all access for good for those who wish to tinker?
For example in the recent Firefox 29 release, the add-on bar has been taken out. They might argue most of the people don't care about it and even though I disagree (I spent 20 minutes trying to put FoxyClocks (to display world time) everywhere else and it simply didn't fit), its ok as long as you put an option in the Preferences to turn it back on (I ended up doing that via installing an extension/add-on). I don't even mind if you turn the option off by default. It is incredibly frustrating to see the designers think that their way is the only way and their use case is the sole case.
Sorry to hijack your point but I suppose you made it well enough to elicit a rant.
Shifting the add-on bar to an extension is the right way for Firefox to head. The core product is simplified, removing something that a very small fraction of its target audience want, and the feature is shifted into an extension. You can still have it, but it’s shifted out of the core. The maintenance burden is then shifted from its being something that might be accidentally broken in the core product to a separate extension that can focus on that one feature, and do it better.
A browser doesn't have much in terms of visible elements, (excluding the main display area) beyond the various toolbars and buttons on them.
If we start considering even those as optional, where does the simplification end? Then why don't we take out the bookmark bar, navigation bar, menu bar, status bar etc and attain supreme simplification by displaying a single text field which should lead to search. Surely the user can search for add-ons from that field and get whatever they want. It'll have the side benefit of helping users attain UI nirvana as well.
It could certainly stand to be shrunk at the very least.
>menu bar
Yes please, I have my browser configured to no menu bar, saves a nice bit of space.
>status bar
There's a popup when I hover a URL and otherwise I get to save space.
More on point, the add-on bar was a dumb idea and behaved weirdly. Good riddance. While a built-in real status bar would be nice, an extension to provide one is pretty good too.
A browser that doesn't show the exact URL of a page is like a car with a built-in GPS that doesn't show the exact location where it's at. After all, who cares about street addresses? The address is occuplied by a Starbucks and we're in Mountain View, so let's just show a Starbucks logo surrounded by a shape that vaguely looks like an outline of Mountain View. You want to go someplace else? We'll show you your destination and the series of turns you need to make to get there, but we won't show you anything else on the way.
If you think a preschooler doesn't need to know how URLs work, you are vastly underestimating the curiosity of a typical preschooler. If you show him a bar with a bunch of letters in it, he'll start typing random letters into that box to see what happens. Likewise, if you show him a detailed map of the town, he will want to explore parts that he's never been to so far. Tinkering and exploration are the foundation of every science, including computer science. Therefore, I don't think it's a good idea to discourage tinkering and exploration, whether in a car or in a browser, unless the benefits greatly outweigh the long-term costs.
With cars, the benefits are probably quite large, since complexity is exactly what makes modern cars so safe and efficient. With browsers, I'm not even sure what the benefits are supposed to be, other than the obvious financial benefit to Google. People who don't want to tinker with the URL bar will just ignore it most of the time. Also, we're talking about the desktop browser here. There are plenty of pixels to waste.
You could argue it's instead like a built-in GPS that doesn't display your exact latitude and longitude - precise information about your location that is interesting, but usually not useful, since you have to take roads/links to actually get from point A to point B.
Most URLs are human-readable enough that I think street addresses make a better analogy.
Latitude/longitude would be more like IP addresses and HTTP headers. They require some technical knowledge to use and understand, but they're still quite human-readable unlike raw GPS signals or ethernet frames.
(As an aside, most GPS units also display the altitude. I live in a mountainous region, so I often make use of this figure.)
> Most URLs are human-readable enough that I think street addresses make a better analogy.
I'd like that to be true, but I think we lost that battle a long time ago. Google results aren't a readable URL; nor are products on Amazon or Ebay or anywhere else I can think of. Newspaper-type URLs are often "fake human-readable"; the URL is something like http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Found , but in fact http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Still-Missing will give you exactly the same story. Even HN stories aren't human-readable, just an opaque id number.
I agree about Google and Amazon's long and cryptic query strings.
But I don't think "fake human-readable" URLs break the analogy with physical addresses. There are many different ways of writing the same address:
987 Some Avenue West, Unit 123, Brooklyn, New York, NY 12345-6789
Unit 123, 987 W. Some Ave., New York 12345
123-987 Some Av W, NYC, NY
Some are more correct than others, and there's probably a canonical version that USPS wants everyone to use. But at the end of the day, a letter addressed to any of the above will be delivered to the same apartment. And of course all the numbers above are "opaque id numbers".
If you meant to send a letter to "The Foundry, 28 Some Street" and instead put 26, the postman would probably deliver it to the right place. Not so with these fake human-readable URLs.
And the numbers aren't just opaque identifiers (except for the zip), at least if you're walking down the street: you know that 28 is next to 26, opposite-ish 27, and halfway to 56. There's nothing that corresponds to walking along the street on a website.
I take your point, but I would argue that it's not comparing apples to apples. Some time ago I read the Douglas Rushkoff book Program or Be Programmed, wherein he puts forth his view (if I may paraphrase) that this last communication revolution based upon the computer is a very important one, because now we’re actually getting to the point where the tools we are creating are starting to take on the characteristics of living things and the people who program these almost-living tools will continue to take on an increasingly important role. Conversely, in the years to come those who do not at least have a basic idea of how programming is done will be at an acute disadvantage (politically, socially, financially, culturally) much like the illiterate following society’s adoption of the written word.
Potential hyperbole and the fact that Rushkoff was talking about programming more so than general computer knowledge aside, I still think there's a relevant point there. I personally feel that giving up all pretense of needing to know how my computer works would put me at a far greater disadvantage in the coming years than were I to do the same with my car. My car is very useful yes, but I don't use it to view the world, my country and its politics, my culture, my future, my finances, and make decisions based on those views.
I think literacy generally is a very good example to study to clear up some widely held misconceptions about "usability". Usability should not be about making things effortless for idiots, but about improving the overall economics of using something - and literacy is far more economical than illiteracy even though an enormous up-front investment is necessary (learning to read and write is a lot of work).
Luckily, society (mostly) seems to have recognized that in the case of literacy and essentially forces everyone through it, instead of assuming that people are morons that can not be taught anything. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about a lot of recent technological development.
Cars are physical objects that are difficult and expensive to reconfigure. This is not the case of software.
My smartphone has a "simple" mode that people can activate for their hypothetical "computer illiterate grandmothers". The option to enable it is even presented to the user during initial setup, so people who feel intimidated by their phone can enable it themselves right out of the box. However other users are not forced to use the interface optimized for the computer illiterate.
But Ipads and Iphones are very consumer focused, in the same way the television is (with more interactivity of course..)
With our editing and creative capabilities getting away from us..(with the keyboards/mouse as last frontiers) we are ending in the same bi-class system of the TV/Radio.. a class that creates the content, working for the monopolies of the industry.. and us only, consuming..
Thats not how the Web was supposed to be.. the idea that we can be both, independent, create novels, music, programs and publish ourselves in pure freedom .. thats what we are loosing by every move of the tech monopolists of our time..
Usability is one thing, being teached to be just a user or a consumer of something is to get back to the XX century, just with a new powerful medium..
Perhaps even the radio/TV revolution of the XX should be free back than, in our own hands.. so people could create tv and radio stations (on free frequencies of course).. but the olders missed this train
It's happening all over again, and it has something to do with this capitalistic nature in formation of big monopolies and their neurosis for controling their results, and create loyal consumers to their products.. when we accept the label of consumers, we giveup our natural right of being human beings.
Technology must create the channels, not BE the channels themselves.. i think that's the original comenter's point
Since this is getting misinterpreted: I'm not saying software (or computers) should be locked down, DRM'd to death and hidden. I'm saying that hiding complexity that does not serve the average user is desirable, and browsers are going down the same path now that cars did a hundred years ago.
So for this specific case, if Chrome wants to hide URLs, go for it; and I'm sure there's a configuration toggle somewhere to turn them back on if you're one of those people who care.
But imagine this happening, average users will become fully IT illiterate. Growing children will no longer know anything about computers, as they grew up in an environment where everything is hidden from them for sake of simplicity.
What will happen, after our generation(s) all get old, and the growned up illiterate children take place of improving world's technology?
There will always be curious people, and relatively inexpensive ways to get access to the inside of things, and large communities of people supporting each other in this endeavor. Yesterday's Commodore 64 game pirate is today's Minecraft modder or iOS jail breaker with Cydia.
We might have an engineering shortage in future ( we do already ), but it will be for many factors , not just lack of opportunities to tinker. If it isn't addressed, we will go long periods of time without nice things (think of the relative stagnation of the web from 2000 to 2008).
No one who is indifferent to URLs has had to pay much attention to them for most of the last 20 years. The UI change discussed here doesn't bring any positive change on that front.
Being able to attend to URLs offers significant utility to a portion of users, though, and this UI change takes that away.
You and your family don't want to think about URLs? Fine. Nobody's asking you to.
But they might ask you to apply that ostensible concern for other people's use patterns a little more broadly.
The user interface with cars is more complex than it used to be. Not just gears, pedals, and a wheel. You now have an entertainment centre, adjustable seats, reversing camera, so on and so forth. Driving is more complicated with more road rules, longer commutes, and a larger culture to absorb. So if the public can deal with an increasing complexity in vehicles, why can't they deal with staying at the same complexity with software, given your analogy?
Not knowing the innards of such a car has nothing to do with the UI - just the same as the people complaining about the change in UI don't need to know the innards of the browser: the source code.
And no, your preschooler isn't in need of understanding the difference between http/s, but sticking with your analogy, your preschooler also isn't driving. Maybe playing with a toy car instead, but not the full monty.
> The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.
This makes the same false assumption about the world when applied to computers: The world does not exist of a binary-human type: people who are experts and people who are not.
I own a 28-year old Volkswagen van. It is completely hackable: the only electronics are three relais. But I don't hack it all by myself. I still, gladly drop it at the local garage to get something fixed. I can stop in nearly any town at the local garage and get stuff replaced, fixed or solved. I've had a waterpump fixed in Germany, my brakes replaced in Sweden, the battery replaced in France and so on.
And that is where the importance of hackability comes into play. Not the fact that /I/, myself can open up a browser or tweak it, but the fact that someone in my proximity can. Instead of having to ship my Macbook-pro to the US to get a fan replaced, my local fixit-guy can open my Thinkpad and replace the fan. Instead of having your computerized and closed-down car towed to the nearest official BMW-garage, I can drop my car at any place where they have a set of screwdrivers and some nuts and bolts and have it fixed.
Making cars (and computers) more difficult to work on makes changes more expensive even if you rely on an expert. It cost $400 to replace the battery in my Mini Cooper because it's a huge pain. I would have done it myself and saved $300 except - it's a huge pain. See the problem? Having an easier car to work on also benefits people who depend on experts.
> For kicks, try replacing "software" with "automobiles" in your paragraph... This should apply to computers.
A very bad analogy.
Auto drivers don't have be concerned about phishing attempts. Nobody sneaks into your garage and replaces your 2009 Toyota Camry with a near perfect duplicate that's wired up with snooping and tracking devices in order to steal your identity, bank accounts, logins, etc.
After 20 years educating the public on what URLs are and how they work we're going up and change things around just to appease the "senior citizen / soccer mom" stereotype. Bad idea. How about we design software for the next generation of tech savvy kids instead of 75 year old senior citizens who still haven't figured out how to use a computer mouse no matter how many times they've been shown?
Also one last point. The software UI was the abstraction of the hardware. We don't need to further abstract the abstraction.
It's funny that decades on, we're just about to finally wrap back around to what most businesses tried to sell the masses as the initial web: a walled in, exclusively consumer ecosystem like AOL.
When forced on us we rejected it, but eventually we walk right into it of our own accord saying "it will be simpler this way."
Ubuntu practiced configuration removal and I dropped them.
One of the 3 reasons why I dropped Ubuntu for Mac OSX was that Ubuntu... didn't allow me to configure my mouse speed. They "merged" the speed and acceleration control of the mouse (which is quite unclever) and also prevented it fom going <1, while I'm usually comfortable at 0.25. It made my tracking devices unusable, thus it made Ubuntu unusable.
Apple is not a company with a configuration-retention philosophy (see e.g. recent Save As... changes). If that's really what matters to you you'd probably be better off with BSD, a more power-user-oriented linux (arch, gentoo, slackware), or even windows.
You are describing a natural process, that can be found in many places: the need for progression. If there is nothing more to invent, first lesser, then well established things become the target for change, so we can keep progressing. Companies do that to keep the illusion of growth. Organizations and people do that to keep their work.
For instance in politics, good laws become narrowed, twisted or get replaced because politicians have to keep their place in society.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect the opposite would be true. Non-power users are more likely to be fooled by the (arbitrarily-chosen by attackers) URL path-info. This focuses relatively more attention on the domain and secure-indicator.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
More like "the only time I care about electricity is when taking a battery from one device and putting it in another".
If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL. The only reason I interact with it is because I want to share the page with someone specific (rather than using a spamming/sharing widget).
But I never manipulate the URL directly, or care about its specific parts.
Hell, if there was a keyboard shortcut for "put reference to current page on copypaste stack" I'd never click the URL at all.
I guess, but that seems far, far more ugly than the elegance of copy paste. Copy-paste doesn't require special implementation, or inter-app compatibility, or anything special or extra.
Why are moving away from powerful and flexible systems that allow us to consume and produce? Why is the trend so constantly towards sealed, black-box, consumption exclusive habits? It makes me so sad to see.
* Dev tools get better and better, giving you better insights into other peoples websites than ever before. One-click to make a minified JS file readable? Awesome!
* Web apps get more complex, giving you the ability to work & create on the web, Google docs let you literally stop mid-sentence, switch the device and keep writing your essay on the go
* Tumblr, wikipedia, twitter, - all relatively recent additions to the web and definitely not "consumption exclusive"
I'm not sure where your "consumption exclusive" comes from. I'd call it just "inclusive". The web tries to be for everyone, and that includes people who couldn't care less about a 20 character hex id when they want to write up their great concept for developing rural areas in Rumania. Sure, you will always have more consumers than producers on the grand scale of things. But I'm failing to see any reason to see recent trends as anything close to what you describe.
If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL.
Yes, android's intent system is neat. But after years of experience with it, it's sadly not a pancea.
Well that's nice, but some of us still have (e.g.) parents to help over the phone. Not to mention the address/URL/etc. field is an important part of computer literacy.
This change (just like the hiding the scheme part) affects everyone who copies links, which is something that almost everyone using the Internet has done at some point. It's just an extra click, but an unnecessary one.
From the article it sounds like Chrome is replacing the URL (which is difficult for humans to parse) with an "origin chip" that contains just the domain name. This improves on the use case you point out.
If we assume that most users do not know what a URL is then why can we assume that the information handed to them by an origin chip is any more useful to them?
Same reason as some browsers started to grey out parts of the hostname - if the only thing a user sees is "bankofamreica.com" or "bankofamerica.com.foroigs.io" they have a better chance of catching the thing that's wrong. Noise/information ratio etc..
I always fix Amazon product page URLs before sending them to others. It's incredible how much useless stuff they put in those URLs. I don't want peoples' screens to fill up with a whole paragraph full of garbage.
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.
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 :)
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").
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?).
> 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)
Well, I am no priest of REST, but I think you are completely misinterpreting Mr. Fielding's point. That whole paragraph that you are quoting there is all about discoverability, at least that's how I interpret it. I mean, he even uses the word "bookmark", a concept which you seem to claim is incompatible with the approach. There is nothing in there that suggests you have to start at the one global canonical URI (which one would that even be? http://www.google.com/?), all it says is that whatever the initial URI is that you start at, the data you get back should be hyperlinked, using URIs, to any other resources that might be related to it, so that you can discover those related resources _without_ _prior_ _knowledge_ of _how_ _to_ _find_ _those_ _related_ _resources_, except through very general knowledge about the media type that the data is formatted as. Really, all that means is that a REST API that exposes a discussion thread and the postings in it, say, should not specify that for a given thread, the postings can be found as <thread-uri>/posting/<number> (because that would be out-of-band), but instead the document describing the thread should contain the URIs of the postings, so that general URI resolution mechanisms can be used to obtain them. In a way, it's all precisely about making things "bookmarkable", by using one common explicit addressing scheme for everything.
And that addresses can become dangling is completely besides the point. To solve that, you need a more stable addressing system instead of just not using addresses at all (which you really can't, if you think you can, you are confused and probably about to create an even less stable addressing system).
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.
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 ), and one that users would be far more familiar with: "button".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] thread>Update: As of version 36.0.1966.0 this has been removed. Iterate quickly!
Dogfoodable Servo based browser arrives in Q4 this year according to https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Roadmap. Probably the most important project on the internet right now.
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.
May not be great, but it's not completely gone (which the article seems to indicate).
Still, I can't imagine it will make web dev easier if the URL isn't always plainly visible.
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.
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.
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.
Practically all developers started as users who got curious about something and wanted to learn. In some ways, the less information a UI exposes to them, the less inclined they will be to ask - because they don't have anything they can particularly ask about. I'm extremely opposed to hiding the default hiding of the URL scheme for this reason: users are far less likely to ask "what's HTTP?" Certainly many won't care, and to them it's "just another part of the website's name", but future developers are (or should be) the ones who do, so it potentially reduces the number of genuinely curious and inquisitive developers. At the same time it conditions them to think that such opaqueness is the norm, the way things should be when they write their own applications, and the vicious cycle repeats.
The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.
This should apply to computers. My family love their iPads and Macs, because they abstract away all the crap they don't care about in, in favor of letting them get stuff done. It's a form of reverse snobbery to insist that no, my grandmother actually should care deeply about whether she's searching via DNS or via Google, or that my preschooler needs to understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.
No, no, a thousand times no. What happened to cars - the replacement of mechanical, inspectable, (dare I say it) hackable components with electronic black boxes was not a good thing. You used to be able to fix and replace most things in an automobile engine with parts from the local auto shop and a shop manual. No longer. Now you have to spend hundreds or thousands to get the correct electronic doohickeys to talk to the closed source, locked down, DRM'd to hell and back engine control modules. And many of the parts aren't repairable in any meaningful sense - you have to go to the dealership to get a new widget, and if your car is too old or too rare, you're just SOL and you have to buy a new car. If this is the world you want for software, I want no part of it.
That really has nothing to do with what is being discussed though. The reliability and efficiency of modern cars are consequences of advances in technology and engineering, not user interface redesign.
In other words, just like modern cars, it's not as necessary to pay attention to the innards for continued operation.
I did this just last week with a fresh Windows 7 installation because the drivers for the Ethernet adapter had to be manually installed...
I am joining many people here, who prefer having configurable tools. I do not want to configure 'IRQ' on any tool I use, but if it will misfunction, I will search for it and find out what IRQ means and how I adjust it to my needs. Worse, is being unable to change 'IRQ' when you need to, because people in charge decided it draws 95% customers away, and you are being in a 5% boat.
I believe hiding implementation details is part of this trend to reduce complexity (which is good) but also to wrestle control away from the user (which is bad).
Actually, yes, it is relevant.
A large chunk of the reason behind the efficiency in particular of newer cars is the addition of those opaque black boxes. Being able to have the car's engine directly tune things according to complicated algorithms, instead of power-hungry mechanical controls, etc, etc.
I was commenting on the black boxes, not the software contained within.
It's fine if you want to turn over your vehicle every three years.
'Modern' cars are not fixable - even the specialists tear our their hair on some cases and give up completely.
Classics are rising steeply in value for people who want to own and understand a piece of machinery for its own sake. Much of modern automotive history will disappear into the maw of the crusher because irreplaceable, irrepairable parts render them useless.
more like eight years, which is not a bad deal.
There have been two steps forward. Simultaneously released alongside, but not dependent on, one step backward.
So why do people defend the step backward under the guise of the steps forward.
You can have complex, highly configurable software that's still locked down, and you can have simple, abstracted software that's open source. It's not a result of the simplification of UIs.
So they won't care about the technology stack, as long as that spreadsheet, text document, 3D image, .... can be edited, saved and printed or a game played.
You can call the function of a car "simple" and a computer infinite in scope, but a twelve year old is allowed to use the latter but not the former. This implies the scope (for mischief) is in some sense far narrower with the computer...
I do get what you're saying of course. But I feel like in the past decade or so we've moved past the car analogy :)
He also mentioned that the cars are pretty much impossible to work on on your own since you need to have the right diagnostic equipment, as opposed to a car one might have bought 15-20 years ago, where a good manual was all that you needed to get into the thick of it.
While I agree that knowledge of the inner functioning should not be required for using a product, I think that it would be nice if there was some sort of effort made to allow one to poke inside. I am guessing that with Chrome there will be some sort of setting that you can use to undo this change (I use Firefox, and rarely, but occasionally, use the about:config tool).
This concept is something I've been playing out in my mind and that I'm starting to explore in my programming. A simple interface that "doesn't make me think" (me being the user), and a well-tucked-away "Advanced" button that, having given the proper warnings, allows the user to poke around on the inside.
I simply don't understand that this point, which is bloody obvious, is completely lost on the so many UI (re)designers. I don't mind you simplify (and most of the time thats all we need) but what is the point behind cutting-off all access for good for those who wish to tinker?
For example in the recent Firefox 29 release, the add-on bar has been taken out. They might argue most of the people don't care about it and even though I disagree (I spent 20 minutes trying to put FoxyClocks (to display world time) everywhere else and it simply didn't fit), its ok as long as you put an option in the Preferences to turn it back on (I ended up doing that via installing an extension/add-on). I don't even mind if you turn the option off by default. It is incredibly frustrating to see the designers think that their way is the only way and their use case is the sole case.
Sorry to hijack your point but I suppose you made it well enough to elicit a rant.
If we start considering even those as optional, where does the simplification end? Then why don't we take out the bookmark bar, navigation bar, menu bar, status bar etc and attain supreme simplification by displaying a single text field which should lead to search. Surely the user can search for add-ons from that field and get whatever they want. It'll have the side benefit of helping users attain UI nirvana as well.
Go for it, show bookmarks on the new tab page.
>navigation bar
It could certainly stand to be shrunk at the very least.
>menu bar
Yes please, I have my browser configured to no menu bar, saves a nice bit of space.
>status bar
There's a popup when I hover a URL and otherwise I get to save space.
More on point, the add-on bar was a dumb idea and behaved weirdly. Good riddance. While a built-in real status bar would be nice, an extension to provide one is pretty good too.
A browser that doesn't show the exact URL of a page is like a car with a built-in GPS that doesn't show the exact location where it's at. After all, who cares about street addresses? The address is occuplied by a Starbucks and we're in Mountain View, so let's just show a Starbucks logo surrounded by a shape that vaguely looks like an outline of Mountain View. You want to go someplace else? We'll show you your destination and the series of turns you need to make to get there, but we won't show you anything else on the way.
If you think a preschooler doesn't need to know how URLs work, you are vastly underestimating the curiosity of a typical preschooler. If you show him a bar with a bunch of letters in it, he'll start typing random letters into that box to see what happens. Likewise, if you show him a detailed map of the town, he will want to explore parts that he's never been to so far. Tinkering and exploration are the foundation of every science, including computer science. Therefore, I don't think it's a good idea to discourage tinkering and exploration, whether in a car or in a browser, unless the benefits greatly outweigh the long-term costs.
With cars, the benefits are probably quite large, since complexity is exactly what makes modern cars so safe and efficient. With browsers, I'm not even sure what the benefits are supposed to be, other than the obvious financial benefit to Google. People who don't want to tinker with the URL bar will just ignore it most of the time. Also, we're talking about the desktop browser here. There are plenty of pixels to waste.
Latitude/longitude would be more like IP addresses and HTTP headers. They require some technical knowledge to use and understand, but they're still quite human-readable unlike raw GPS signals or ethernet frames.
(As an aside, most GPS units also display the altitude. I live in a mountainous region, so I often make use of this figure.)
I'd like that to be true, but I think we lost that battle a long time ago. Google results aren't a readable URL; nor are products on Amazon or Ebay or anywhere else I can think of. Newspaper-type URLs are often "fake human-readable"; the URL is something like http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Found , but in fact http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Still-Missing will give you exactly the same story. Even HN stories aren't human-readable, just an opaque id number.
But I don't think "fake human-readable" URLs break the analogy with physical addresses. There are many different ways of writing the same address:
Some are more correct than others, and there's probably a canonical version that USPS wants everyone to use. But at the end of the day, a letter addressed to any of the above will be delivered to the same apartment. And of course all the numbers above are "opaque id numbers".And the numbers aren't just opaque identifiers (except for the zip), at least if you're walking down the street: you know that 28 is next to 26, opposite-ish 27, and halfway to 56. There's nothing that corresponds to walking along the street on a website.
Potential hyperbole and the fact that Rushkoff was talking about programming more so than general computer knowledge aside, I still think there's a relevant point there. I personally feel that giving up all pretense of needing to know how my computer works would put me at a far greater disadvantage in the coming years than were I to do the same with my car. My car is very useful yes, but I don't use it to view the world, my country and its politics, my culture, my future, my finances, and make decisions based on those views.
Luckily, society (mostly) seems to have recognized that in the case of literacy and essentially forces everyone through it, instead of assuming that people are morons that can not be taught anything. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about a lot of recent technological development.
My smartphone has a "simple" mode that people can activate for their hypothetical "computer illiterate grandmothers". The option to enable it is even presented to the user during initial setup, so people who feel intimidated by their phone can enable it themselves right out of the box. However other users are not forced to use the interface optimized for the computer illiterate.
With our editing and creative capabilities getting away from us..(with the keyboards/mouse as last frontiers) we are ending in the same bi-class system of the TV/Radio.. a class that creates the content, working for the monopolies of the industry.. and us only, consuming..
Thats not how the Web was supposed to be.. the idea that we can be both, independent, create novels, music, programs and publish ourselves in pure freedom .. thats what we are loosing by every move of the tech monopolists of our time..
Usability is one thing, being teached to be just a user or a consumer of something is to get back to the XX century, just with a new powerful medium..
Perhaps even the radio/TV revolution of the XX should be free back than, in our own hands.. so people could create tv and radio stations (on free frequencies of course).. but the olders missed this train
It's happening all over again, and it has something to do with this capitalistic nature in formation of big monopolies and their neurosis for controling their results, and create loyal consumers to their products.. when we accept the label of consumers, we giveup our natural right of being human beings.
Technology must create the channels, not BE the channels themselves.. i think that's the original comenter's point
So for this specific case, if Chrome wants to hide URLs, go for it; and I'm sure there's a configuration toggle somewhere to turn them back on if you're one of those people who care.
But imagine this happening, average users will become fully IT illiterate. Growing children will no longer know anything about computers, as they grew up in an environment where everything is hidden from them for sake of simplicity.
What will happen, after our generation(s) all get old, and the growned up illiterate children take place of improving world's technology?
We might have an engineering shortage in future ( we do already ), but it will be for many factors , not just lack of opportunities to tinker. If it isn't addressed, we will go long periods of time without nice things (think of the relative stagnation of the web from 2000 to 2008).
Being able to attend to URLs offers significant utility to a portion of users, though, and this UI change takes that away.
You and your family don't want to think about URLs? Fine. Nobody's asking you to.
But they might ask you to apply that ostensible concern for other people's use patterns a little more broadly.
Not knowing the innards of such a car has nothing to do with the UI - just the same as the people complaining about the change in UI don't need to know the innards of the browser: the source code.
And no, your preschooler isn't in need of understanding the difference between http/s, but sticking with your analogy, your preschooler also isn't driving. Maybe playing with a toy car instead, but not the full monty.
This makes the same false assumption about the world when applied to computers: The world does not exist of a binary-human type: people who are experts and people who are not.
I own a 28-year old Volkswagen van. It is completely hackable: the only electronics are three relais. But I don't hack it all by myself. I still, gladly drop it at the local garage to get something fixed. I can stop in nearly any town at the local garage and get stuff replaced, fixed or solved. I've had a waterpump fixed in Germany, my brakes replaced in Sweden, the battery replaced in France and so on.
And that is where the importance of hackability comes into play. Not the fact that /I/, myself can open up a browser or tweak it, but the fact that someone in my proximity can. Instead of having to ship my Macbook-pro to the US to get a fan replaced, my local fixit-guy can open my Thinkpad and replace the fan. Instead of having your computerized and closed-down car towed to the nearest official BMW-garage, I can drop my car at any place where they have a set of screwdrivers and some nuts and bolts and have it fixed.
A very bad analogy.
Auto drivers don't have be concerned about phishing attempts. Nobody sneaks into your garage and replaces your 2009 Toyota Camry with a near perfect duplicate that's wired up with snooping and tracking devices in order to steal your identity, bank accounts, logins, etc.
After 20 years educating the public on what URLs are and how they work we're going up and change things around just to appease the "senior citizen / soccer mom" stereotype. Bad idea. How about we design software for the next generation of tech savvy kids instead of 75 year old senior citizens who still haven't figured out how to use a computer mouse no matter how many times they've been shown?
Also one last point. The software UI was the abstraction of the hardware. We don't need to further abstract the abstraction.
When forced on us we rejected it, but eventually we walk right into it of our own accord saying "it will be simpler this way."
One of the 3 reasons why I dropped Ubuntu for Mac OSX was that Ubuntu... didn't allow me to configure my mouse speed. They "merged" the speed and acceleration control of the mouse (which is quite unclever) and also prevented it fom going <1, while I'm usually comfortable at 0.25. It made my tracking devices unusable, thus it made Ubuntu unusable.
>synclient MinSpeed=1.2 AccelFactor=0.25
Make it permanent in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
My 6 year old laptop has multi-touch pad emulation on Ubuntu Gnome 14.04... I couldnt be happier.
For instance in politics, good laws become narrowed, twisted or get replaced because politicians have to keep their place in society.
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.
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.
The web ate AOL, now AOL closed-model is resurfacing.
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.
Safari in OS X Mavericks has Tweet/Facebook/etc https://www.apple.com/safari/images/overview_builtin_2x.jpg
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.
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
Is really irritating.
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.
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.
If there was a way to tell Chrome "Share this website on Skype to this person" or "Send this to this-or-that IRC channel" I would never care about the URL. The only reason I interact with it is because I want to share the page with someone specific (rather than using a spamming/sharing widget).
But I never manipulate the URL directly, or care about its specific parts.
Hell, if there was a keyboard shortcut for "put reference to current page on copypaste stack" I'd never click the URL at all.
Why are moving away from powerful and flexible systems that allow us to consume and produce? Why is the trend so constantly towards sealed, black-box, consumption exclusive habits? It makes me so sad to see.
* Web apps get more complex, giving you the ability to work & create on the web, Google docs let you literally stop mid-sentence, switch the device and keep writing your essay on the go
* Tumblr, wikipedia, twitter, - all relatively recent additions to the web and definitely not "consumption exclusive"
I'm not sure where your "consumption exclusive" comes from. I'd call it just "inclusive". The web tries to be for everyone, and that includes people who couldn't care less about a 20 character hex id when they want to write up their great concept for developing rural areas in Rumania. Sure, you will always have more consumers than producers on the grand scale of things. But I'm failing to see any reason to see recent trends as anything close to what you describe.
C-l (lower case L) to select the URL and then C-c to copy is one way to do this on many systems without without clicking anything.
Yes, android's intent system is neat. But after years of experience with it, it's sadly not a pancea.
Well that's nice, but some of us still have (e.g.) parents to help over the phone. Not to mention the address/URL/etc. field is an important part of computer literacy.
Do you not check the url before you give out your credit card details and website passwords?
With this change, all you'd see is "google.com" which totally seems legit for providing your username and password, without the additional form URL.
go to the top level domain directly instead of hunting and hoping that they have a link there
going up several directories on an ftp site
go from reddit.com/r/starcraft to reddit.com/r/nba
go from a foo.github.io/bar docs page to github.com/foo/bar instead of hunting, and hoping, for a link
increment the page number on a blog by several instead of clicking next repeatedly
prepend http://www.google.com/url?q= to NYTimes urls to avoid paywall
add ?limit=100 to see more comments on reddit comment page
going to a new topic on wikipedia
This change was akin to Microsoft removing the Start menu.
And it highlights the importance of open source software.
And demonstrates how greed (seriously, how much MORE money and success does google need at this point) betrays quality.
Keep using duckduckgo, everyone!
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
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
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-hyperte...
And that addresses can become dangling is completely besides the point. To solve that, you need a more stable addressing system instead of just not using addresses at all (which you really can't, if you think you can, you are confused and probably about to create an even less stable addressing system).
Still think my original point stands - that this UI decision isn't so different from entering a service for the first time.
> To solve that, you need a more stable addressing system instead of just not using addresses at all
I think this is generally solved with wishy-thinking and redirects.
Removal of editable URLs will push a few percentage of address bar led traffic to to search.
If there's no way to enter urls, then all that's left is to search google.
A URL has a thing called a chip?
What?
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.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=59592
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.
Google has gone insane with mirror gazing.
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.
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.
That's quite convoluted, and makes people look retarded :P
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.