#1 What does Google want the web to look like? Look at Google News.
#2 Google gets to hijack 20%~ of the screen space to get users to install their own apps, and go back to Google, not onward to the publisher's own website.
#3 Removing the URL is the final disambiguation, where no one but the most technical users can go where they want.
In what sense?
Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.
Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?
This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.
Sorry, copy and paste or clicking on a link they were emailed is a huge struggle? How are they receiving these URLs that they aren't immediately usable?
>Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters.
I've seen too many people who ostensibly understand URLs get phished to think it much matters.
Here's another example for you, that just happened today:
On a shared iPad, the iPad was returned with a note saying 'no safari'. I worked out that one student had changed the default Safari search engine to DuckDuckGo. For reasons, the school's ISP blocks DuckDuckGo and visiting it on an iPad just results in a 'connection was lost' message.
The next student needed to visit a website called Kahoot and the URL for this site is kahoot.com. Looking at the history I could see the student had just been typing 'kahoot' in to the URL/search bar over and over again. They also tried typing 'google'. At no point did they try entering the URL nor does it seem they even know how to do anything beyond type search keywords.
Better to have typing "Kahoot" into the topbar bring up a Google search that navigates to Kahoot.com than the user experience I had at that age, which was a DNS resolution failure because no TLD was specified. That was an era where none but the most technical users could go where they wanted.
Regarding your second paragraph, sure it would be better for search results to be displayed if there's no TLD specified. However, when it's the ONLY way you know how to access a website and when that fails, as it did today, knowing how to manually enter a URL would be useful.
I agree that things are much more user friendly today, but because things are so easy people get really stuck when those ways fail and they have no way of troubleshooting anything.
I won't get in to how many students (and teachers) I see stumped because the ethernet cable has come out of their laptop or they can't open a file because they've copied the shortcut to a folder to a USB rather than the folder itself.
That's quite a shock if students don't know about urls. Can someone confirm if this is a secluded case or this is what most people end up with now a days.
I don't find this unbelievable but even here, I would expect 40% people to know about urls and 5% or so know about the technical details surrounding it.
If you haven't interacted with kids who don't have any tech-fluent influences in their life, you would be shocked at how much isn't understood. Just mobile phones and apps for the 'internet' has meant that it's so easy to access what you need (and also so limiting in what you can access) that most kids just haven't got a clue how the internet actually works.
I suppose most of the time they don't NEED to know, but I think it's a bit problematic that unless something has an app, they probably aren't going to know it exists. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. is the entirety of what they access on the internet.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, but the majority are absolutely clueless. Ironic when everyone is expecting them to be so tech savvy because they've grown up around it. Problem is, it's too abstracted and too corporate.
I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...
Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.
But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
If the latter, the default behavior gets in the way of the critical path.
I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field.
For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.
Nor, for that matter, can you click, ctrl-A (yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth keyboard). Instead it's click, then Copy Icon.
Utterly blinkered.
Oddly: Incognito mode is not (yet) crippled in this manner.
Don't get me started on pull-to-nuke-whatever-you'd-been-composing-or-losing-your-place-in-infernal-scroll
I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
For cross-device control, there's ... Synergy, I think:
There's an Android client (I've no experience with it): https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/
On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.)
You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke.
It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
In practice, I end up manually typing in long URLs on my laptop that people send me over SMS or whatever, and manually typing in long, high-entropy passwords on my phone when I would rather copy-paste them from my laptop's password database.
(Not that I'm running KDE. But the feature sounds great.)
edit: I should mention that I think this requires drivers on the computer end, so probably won't on iOS/Android
In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.
None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.
Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid.
Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid.
Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
Editing is much easier. 2 clicks. Cursor starts at the end, swipe to scroll and tap to place cursor where you want it.It was very annoying before.
Most of the time I want to copy a URL. It's now 2 fast clicks. Previously you had to long click or something to try to select all the text, then some extra step I've forgotten. I often had to try several times.
Share is now much faster. Two fast clicks. Previously it was click top right ... long drop down menu, scroll down to Share. Click that.
If you can't go to expedia.com as easily as you can Google search Expedia, you'll probably do the later. And if you Google search Expedia, the first result is usually an ad for Expedia. Now Google makes money on you in a way they hadn't before. The more people expect Google to deal with all of the silly "web domain stuff" for them, the more money Google makes.
It's all about the incentives, and in the end there's only one incentive -- money.
I don't think anyone working at Google is being intentionally bad at all, but I do think their incentive structure ultimately results in prioritizing feeding people ads as much a possible. The A/B tests show that doing things a certain way results in more revenue, and that's what drives the decisions. There are likely no ethics meetings on the implications on society for each small change, but the collective result of many small harmless changes (aimed at increasing profit) is bad for society in the end. Not due to any conspiracy or "evil".
Typing a new address or copying the URL of the page I'm on covers ~95% of the use cases where I'm accessing the address bar on mobile and the change significantly reduces friction for both. It's exhausting to see every minute move Google/Amazon makes filtered through the HN cynicism lens.
Edit: Talking specifically about the chrome on Android omnibar change. The favicon desktop search change from TFA was awful.
Here is a story from April 2019: https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
with respect, I don't think there would be an ethics meeting scenario about whether the default interaction for tapping the URL bar is copy or edit that would find any ethical concerns, besides "nerds will be annoyed we moved their cheese."
Source: Google employee.
Many of kind of people that come to HN have personally worked on various forms of gamification and rule bending. It's as natural to SV culture as water to fish - indeed some of the biggest companies wouldn't be around without skirting rules and arguably morals.
The stench of MBAs and quarterly profit optimizing execs is all over the valley.
And then the ignorance/apathy of the layman adds an extra layer of plausibility to such accusations.
A good explanation for the increasingly normalized dark patterns ruining user experience on the web.
"Conspiratorial"? You bet. Have we not seen huge (and small) companies committed to screwing the public in as many ways as they can? It's not by accident, there's a widespread, condescending disrepect of users and just plain old conspiratorial maliciousness, intent on manipulating users and squeezing more profit.
Google's search results design (backtracked for now) is a clear symptom.
...and they only made it more of one by making you press an extra button. It's like they took the "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" mantra and turned it into "easy things should be easy, hard things should be harder."
Latest Chrome mobile running on Android 9.
Judging by the current state, it'll arrive with no add-on support, which I honestly hope doesn't happen.
I have already seen seen some ascii stars in the URLs of Googles ads. There is always abuse.
As of today, search results are still favicons on mobile...
If the results are requested with a simpler HTTP client that does not automatically execute Javascript or CSS, where we can control te HTTP headers, then these manipulations can easily be sidestepped.
This is not "blocking". It is using a client that does not process JS or CSS, where we can easily control the headers sent. This can be done, e.g., with openssl s_client, obsd nc, socat, etc.
They are probably sending different html+css+js based on user-agent.
They have been doing that for many years. The difference this time is people are objecting to the look of what they are sending.
It not as easy as you say it is, theyre using server side scripts to mangle the URLs.
However, I wonder how privoxy users handle TLS.
I use localhost proxies to decrypt TLS before it reaches destination programs as well as encrypt outgoing plaintext HTTP traffic from non-TLS enabled programs.
Using proxies allows me to edit incoming and outgoing traffic where needed.
From the privoxy FAQ:
4.15. How can Privoxy filter Secure (HTTPS) URLs?
Since secure HTTP connections are encrypted SSL sessions between your browser and the secure site, and are meant to be reliably secure, there is little that Privoxy can do but hand the raw gibberish data though from one end to the other unprocessed.
The only exception to this is blocking by host patterns, as the client needs to tell Privoxy the name of the remote server, so that Privoxy can establish the connection. If that name matches a host-only pattern, the connection will be blocked.
As far as ad blocking is concerned, this is less of a restriction than it may seem, since ad sources are often identifiable by the host name, and often the banners to be placed in an encrypted page come unencrypted nonetheless for efficiency reasons, which exposes them to the full power of Privoxy's ad blocking.
"Content cookies" (those that are embedded in the actual HTML or JS page content, see filter{content-cookies}), in an SSL transaction will be impossible to block under these conditions. Fortunately, this does not seem to be a very common scenario since most cookies come by traditional means.
Except if you use YouTube, which is a pretty significant service but impossible to use domain-based adblock like pi-hole with since both ads and content are served through the same Google domain. If you use the YouTube for Android app that means you have to sit through ads.
The alternative is something like invidious[0], but last time I tried it was impossible to seek videos more than half an hour because the seek bar shares its space with the player controls so it ends up occupying only ~15% of the viewport. That or waiting for Firefox Nightly to support WebExtensions.
However, ads and video are not served through the same Google domain.
Further, the ads are not served unless Javascript is enabled.
As such, aside from user comments, it is easy to retrieve the non-video content without retrieving the ads. Just use an HTTP client that ignores Javascript.
Javascript is not needed to view video from the domains that serve the video.
Even if you have a lot of pages, you can still make a readable URL, like The New York Times "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/style/modern-love-podcast.... None of that except perhaps "https://" and ".html" are mysterious computer codes.
Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729
People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?
Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before.
Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control.
Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.
Does this mean they'll also "backtrack" on their destruction of the URL? I was extremely disturbed and horrified when I realised that not only did they replace / with >, but also seemed to arbitrarily remove and rewrite pieces of URLs shown in the results (e.g. all articles from HM would show nothing more than "news.ycombinator.com > item", which was intensely confusing.)