It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users. From the Wired article Ars probably based their writeup on (Ars links it):

"People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity."

> It's not about getting rid of URLs, it's about not displaying them to most users.

And one of their incentives in doing so is that Google is an alternative to URLs. Already many users Google ‘facebook’ and click on the first link rather than just typing ‘facebook.com’ (or ‘face’ TAB ENTER).

Although I don’t believe I saw it in the article, it’s in Google’s interest to mediate all access to the Internet for consumers — this isn’t fundamentally different from Facebook’s VPN. It’s not in users’ interest, of course.

If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately, maybe on different lines (with maybe colour used to distinguish HTTPs vice HTTP):

   news.ycombinator.com
   reply?id=…

> If they cared about security they could do something like display the domain & the path separately

They've tried experiments but it's not as easy as it might seem at first thought. Consider what happens with someone setting up a hostname like bankofamerica.secureuserportal.com or www.gmail.personaluserinbox.biz – a fair number of people will look at the left part rather than reading from the right so even displaying it separately won't help, especially if they don't have a huge window with tons of room and all they see is the first part of "www.bankofamerica.comsecurecardholderservices.ru".

Only displaying the domain name will help with that problem but it has usability issues for any company which handles user data under subdomains since it'd be harder to tell user1.example.com from user2.example.com if there's any possibility of spoofing.

Agreed. Google's ubiquity coupled with the proposed change to Chrome threatens to morph a user's experience of the open Internet into something akin to AOL and its keyword feature. That puts the Internet back fifteen or more years.

People searching 'facebook.com' on google seems like an indication that urls are already broken.

People searching 'facebook.com' on google seems like a user education problem to me.

In fact, if I was Google (and I was less scrupulous), that's the kind of behavior I would encourage: train users to type destinations into Google, serve up the results using AMP, obfuscate the whole thing by eliminating URLs, then users will just stay in Google's ecosystem and never leave.

Sorry, but that is just such a bullshit quote. They want to have control on identity and that's it. URL as the article say stands for Uniform Resource Locators and is about locating resources, not proving identity.

They are trying to solve an issue which isn't even part of the responsibility of the URL. The domain is the truthteller here. If you can find a way to display to the user what actual domain he or she is on,you have solved the issue.

Yes, that's why I characterized it as "not displaying them to most users". They aren't proposing getting rid of URLs or changing how they are used in retrieving pages or etc., they just might stop showing them to users because people mostly don't get much information from them.

But the issue is that many also get much information from them. It's like removing info about air pressure in your car tires because "most people don't understand it".

I don't understand why we should view computer illiteracy as something we must cater to. You don't have to know everything about how URL works, but being able to change ?page=1 to ?page=2 and knowing what is probably going to happen and similar tasks is knowledge probably needed today and should be teached.

Why does people never learn this? If you teach people to be uneducated this is exactly what they will become.

People don't understand URLs because we hid them from people. Let's solve the problem by completely hiding the URLs!

There needs to be some way for a user to be able to see something either online or, for example, out on a vendor's stall selling soap or honey, and go to it on their browser. The only thing I can imagine that's simpler than that is a QR code, but it requires you to have a phone that has a good camera, which isn't possible in some places that are developing because a phone is kind of expensive, whereas a URL just requires a pen and paper. A simple URL can be remembered without writing it down, like "blog.google".

I will be surprised if URLs go away completely in the next 50+ years, but a new way to verify the identity of the website will probably be developed, if it's necessary.

URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are. They don't have the time for learning what it means. If they want to access a website they will Google for it and click on the first result and don't look at the address bar. As a consequence of that they are easy phishing targets, just setup a domain that looks more or less legit and you're good.

Unfortunately the easy solution to that seems to be more walled gardens. I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing Google-certified websites. Registering your website with the Google Search Console will start to become mandatory to appear in the top results. Or implement AMP.

So I'm with you but I think it's important to understand that URLs are broken for most people. When you see a perfectly legible piece of text, their brain is automatically blurring it like some piece of flesh in a Japanese Hentai.

>URLs are useless for normal people, normal people don't know what URLs are.

This is a truism, but I'm not certain it's true. Is there actual data to back this up? What definition of "normal" is being used here.. the average person using the internet, or non-technically trained people?

The web has been around for decades now, and everyone including my nearly 70 year old mother uses it, and URLs have been pretty ubiquitous for a long time. Not knowing what a URL is seems about as likely as not knowing what a TV channel is, or that they have a bank account number.

It seems more likely to me that normal people do know what they are, but find avoiding them to be more convenient than using them.

Google knows better than anyone what the world should do—- just ask them.

The arrogance coming off of this company is unreal at times.

> URLs is fantastic, solves the problem well and basically has little to no issues.

I strongly disagree. I do tend to think that they're useful and not obviously replaceable, but claiming they have no issues is dubious.

Spoofing, with or without the added level of sophisticated enabled by unicode. Special character handling (e.g. whitespace) is sometimes problematic. URL longevity is a real issue. Server-side security has been compromised in the past using "../" in URLs.

I'm sure I could come up with more, and I imagine there's a "top 10 fallacies programmers believe about URLs" list out there that would provide more examples.

Issues:

punycode, similar-domain name squatting, SSRF/ generally parsing urls properly, parsing uniformly

probably 100 others but this was just off the top of my head. Some of these they intend to deal with, some they do not.

It does make sense to me to at least change the pattern to something like protocol://com/domain/subdomain/subdistinction/specificresource and standardize the way these interact with all the parts of the web.

I don't think it makes sense. Most languages read left to right. The thing I'm most concerned with is what specific site I'm on. If I'm on facebook.com, the most important thing to me is "facebook", not "com". So it seems natural to me for that to be on the left.

The problem is that facebook.com.google-safe-pages.verizonmobile.evil-site.cn also displays the ‘facebook’ portion leftmost.

Also, due to the way DNS works you really are trusting ICANN, then the com registrar, then facebook (CAs add an overlay, but then CAs like Let’s Encrypt ultimately trust … DNS). Making that explicit would probably be a good thing (and might even be a first step towards a rootless, decentralised future).

Get off https://my.lawn/!