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=…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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."