If this is indeed the real motivation, the next obvious target would be bookmarks. What can be done about them? Replace the bookmarked URLs by Google queries? It would be an interesting functionality if Google could look at a page and give you the smallest query that would have returned exactly this page as a first result. Then bookmark the query instead of the URL. And if the search results change in the future... I suppose, it would be possible to spin this as a feature. ("Self-improving bookmarks" perhaps? You don't have to worry about link rot; with latest Google self-improving bookmarks, your bookmark will always point to the best existing page on given topic!)
Bookmarking is one of the areas where firefox is clearly superior.
It made the Safari 13 Extension-pocalypse so much harder to bear. Every browser I can pick from has something important I have to compromise on.
Maybe like a decade ago this was a student project that Google sponsored (maybe as either Summer of Code or some precursor to that). A student group developed a system for “tagging” a page with a series of “random” but memorable words that could be used to identify a page. Kinda like how imgur and other other sites generate URLs now. Like “glittery hamster bananas” or something like that.
Just out of curiosity, is there a publicly accessible Google service, or a third party service, that does this? That would be useful to find more content or point-of-view about a topic (by looking at the other results)
They already had the feature you are worried about and it's existed since like 1999. Do you remember the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? You could bookmark a query and it would redirect you to the first result for that search. It was discontinued in 2010 [Wikipedia].
I feel like there are a lot more sane things to be paranoid about in the world right now, but mandatory "I'm feeling lucky" doesn't reach my top 20000.
“Jerry, you don’t deserve the internet” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR4h4eIR2E
If it looks like Google.com, then it Google.com. The logo even says so.
It’s a dumbing down of the internet, in an attempt to help the average user, but it won’t work and you’re just making life harder for those who know just a bit more then average.
What better way to keep people on AMP pages, than to make them so ignorant as to not even know how to tell the difference?
Sometimes I wonder if feudalism must have felt like this from the perspective of the noble people. Will there be a dark age followed by enlightenment? Because right now we seem to encounter self-imposed nonage.
AMP adds 2-3 additional actions to that user flow.
For me, it’s to get information. Why do I care what format the information is presented in?
There are a couple of reasons they could be making this change highlighted in these threads.
And no, users do not need to care the slightest whether they go to the first, second or 3rd URL. What they care about is that they are entering their sensitive information on mybank.com's domain and not a russian counterpart, that's it.
The onus to protect against a website takeover is on the domain/server owner, certainly not on the browser vendor although they try to mitigate simple attack vectors.
edit: added a few 9s
They already used colors to de-emphasize other components, this doesn't look like anything else than pushing people to rely more on google search.
Refraining from collecting malicious links happens before you click, by the time it's in the URL bar it's already pretty late to mitigate against attacks.
Users with the level of paranoia that puts Google in the "untrusted site" space should be sidestepping this whole conversation by avoiding using the browser Google develops regardless of what Google does to its URL bar.
The whole idea of AMP pages is sketchy by default, as it's Google taking content from websites run by news media outlets and hosting it on their own servers so they have even more control over user-tracking.
In the long term, this has the potential to further centralize the Internet, something the Internet was never meant to be.
It's not that difficult to imagine a future where news media won't even host their own stuff anymore but instead outsource it all to Google.
Very comparable to how Facebook has become the de-facto place for small businesses, with little to no IT knowledge, to have their own little web-presence.
Which has certain advantages, but it's dangerous to belittle the very real disadvantages that kind of centralization of content will have in the long term.
IMHO it's our duty as technical users to advocate for a more private, open and de-centralized web for everyone.... We should especially be doing it on behalf of the users who don't understand the long term implications of Google's (anti-) features.
'Just switch to another browser if you don't like it' is not a compelling argument.
Every tool in the toolbox to make the web better.
In that context, it's a bit cynical to belittle the problem as you are doing there when this has been a very real issue for several years. As by now Google, Facebook, and Amazon control the vast majority of web traffic and have been doing so for years already [0].
This isn't some hypothetical scenario, it's something that's already very real.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
A few months back, people on HN were wondering why creating a new tab in Firefox causes the URL bar to become magnified.
I wonder if this is part of the reason. Perhaps Firefox believes they have to educate users about the URL bar because Chrome is attacking it.
That metaphor is based on a false premise[1]:
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.
In fact, I think the evidence is not only overwhelming but the tech community is thoroughly comprimised, proven so on account of all the recent purges and attacks on wrong-think.
I no longer trust my software.
I guess some people just feel guilty/ashamed!
Safari has hidden the full URL since 2014. For the vast majority of users, the full URL is just noise.
It's iconic but it's a UI space resource hog. To improve browser experience, sometimes one has to be willing to try slaughtering a sacred cow.
https://old.reddit.com/r/space/
Fits fine and tells you at least three useful things that just "reddit.com" doesn't.
https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/h8t50n/i_often_get_a...
Doesn't fit, but even truncated it still tells you the same useful things.
In fact, using the URL bar for it assumes that the path has semantic meaning, which is not an assumption that the URL standard actually requires.
The page isn't required by anything to contain that information or to give it accurately. How do you distinguish example.edu/financial-aid/ from example.edu/~some-student/ ?
> In fact, using the URL bar for it assumes that the path has semantic meaning, which is not an assumption that the URL standard actually requires.
It doesn't assume anything, it just shows you the URL. If it has semantic meaning then you can see that -- which it commonly does.
That's an unrealistic example because no website worth its salt is going to let students put arbitrary content in the same domain as the financial aid system. That's a recipe for leaking cookies that contain session tokens, and displaying a full URL won't save a user.
By the time you see the ~some-student in the URL bar, the security game is over.
It could be that example.edu/financial-aid/ is just information and PDFs and doesn't have any sessions or cookies. Or the real financial aid system is on another domain, but a first time user doesn't know that, they're just looking at www.example.edu/~some-student/ which appears to be a financial aid page that Chrome only says is example.edu.
Or any other case where the contents of the URL matters. How about example.edu/~some-student/ vs. example.edu/~a-different-student/ or example.edu/~your-professor/?
The other scenario you describe, if the risk is someone intentionally deceiving users by cloning a page on the university network owned by someone else for deceptive purposes, is better solved by a university disciplinary hearing than by expecting every student to understand URL paths.
The attacker may not be able to get ~financial-aid, only ~juan-ramirez, and even if you don't know about home directories, the first thing that strikes you about ~juan-ramirez/financial-aid is that something is wrong because you are not Juan Ramirez. If you do know about home directories then it's a giant red flag which you can't see if the browser is hiding it from you.
It doesn't have to prevent 100% of attacks. Preventing 7% of attacks is still 7% better than nothing.
> The other scenario you describe, if the risk is someone intentionally deceiving users by cloning a page on the university network owned by someone else for deceptive purposes, is better solved by a university disciplinary hearing than by expecting every student to understand URL paths.
The most common way things like that happen isn't the actual student who would have to be using their own name, it's that the student uses a weak password or gets their computer infected with malware and then some Russian hacker sets up on their school account.
You also don't need every user to understand them, only one who then reports it. If you don't show the paths to anybody then much more likely that nobody notices, or that it takes longer for somebody to notice and more people get compromised in the meantime.
User studies indicate that the first thing a user notices is... Nothing. The gobbledygook in the path is so much noise for the average user that they don't notice if the path seems off. In fact, it makes sense to hide it from a security standpoint to decrease the odds that users go information blind to the domain, because we already know that improper domain routing to lookalike domains is, by far, the most common vector for credential theft.
There isn't even a guarantee that showing the path to address the 7% case (which really looks like more 0.07%) will on average cause the incidence of users being compromised to go down, if it means users are less likely to notice that the subdomain and domain are off.
I'm sure that for the people who really care, it won't take long to hack together a chrome extension that drops the full URL into the page title or a pop-up box on the page itself.
There are a thousand ways to screw up a user study, but one of the best ways to detect a screw up is if they say that users either always or never do something.
> In fact, it makes sense to hide it from a security standpoint to decrease the odds that users go information blind to the domain, because we already know that improper domain routing to lookalike domains is, by far, the most common vector for credential theft.
Which is why it makes sense to highlight the domain. Make it a different color. Make it a bigger font size. That still doesn't require you to omit the rest of the URL.
> I'm sure that for the people who really care, it won't take long to hack together a chrome extension that drops the full URL into the page title or a pop-up box on the page itself.
Except that the people who actually do that really are the 0.07% and you've still lost the 6.93% who would've noticed if you'd put it in front of them but aren't about actively change the default you gave them ahead of time.
... but probably more importantly, nobody likely needs to hack together an extension after all. Older news story about how Chrome will add an option to show the full URL bar as non-default.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-chrome-will-give-you-a...
It's still cheaper to build a $450 real desktop computer (that lasts decades+) than it is to buy a $800 4 year life gimped smart phone that can't do any productive work any isn't in my control.
(And my $20 nokia dumb phone has worked perfectly since 2006 for phone calls/text.)
We're talking about the person in small-town India who has a Micromax Black Q385 spark 3, 8GB store, 1GB ram, 5.5" screen, which they bought for $50. They also get their Internet access through the cellular equivalent of a drinking straw.
(Even still, my personal guess is that this URL bar change isn't about them; it's about the desktop experience).
Also, "use a real computer" is a pretty elitist attitude that misses Google's goals overall. Google is not targeting exclusively users that have desktop machines with multiple cores and graphics accelerator cards. They want to provide internet services and internet access to people whose only portal to the web is a mobile device.
Are you seriously claiming you need all (or even just more than like 10%) of your 1920+ pixels of screen width for your Chrome extensions?
Oh, I'm not missing that. Google's software offerings are now primarily designed for bad computers with bad UI, bad network, and bad energy storage. Because people love those crappy devices and most use them primarily. We both agree.
>A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space,
Which really doesn't matter if you're on a desktop computer with an actual monitor. The only reason to do this is more "convergence" BS and thinking phone crutches are required on desktop.
2) UI improvements are not "cosmetic reasons," they directly translate to ease and efficiency of task completion. As a UI engineer, hearing my category of work called "cosmetic changes" can be, quite frankly, exhausting. If someone were to halve the default font sizes on all browsers, would we consider that a mere "cosmetic change" or would it be a change that would have direct and immediate impact on people's ability to accomplish tasks?
You know what else is "a UI space resource hog" on the web ? Advertising. And I'm sorry but "wasted" space is generally much bigger. So, no, I'm not ready to loose my address bar for bigger ads.
Chrome is well into the commodity software scale, and one should assume its UI decisions will lean in the direction of maximum utility for the most users.
This is clearly not their motive.
What Google is trying to do here is to drift the web from its most iconic components: the URL. This is the biggest threat to the web that we loved for so many years.