Hmm, don't all mobile browsers already autohide the URL bar when the page starts scrolling up? Seems like that worked fine so far. Besides the OP is about hiding part of the URL (path), not the URL bar of the browsers.

Seems Firefox previews doesn't, and I honestly prefer it that way. They moved it to the bottom of the screen which makes it easier to use and less intrusive.

Hiding part of the path allows them to shrink the bar horizontally, which leaves more room for other content, such as chrome extensions.

The URL can already be longer than the screen to begin with, so they could still do that and show as much as will fit, showing the rest if you click on it. This is already what Firefox does.

But from a UI standpoint, having a text box that is too small for its common displayed content is sloppy. If the path usually makes things too long, hide the path by default until the user asks for it.

It's only too small when it's too small.

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.

But that's useful information that's told me redundantly by the page title and the banner at the top of the page also. I don't need the URL bar for that.

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.

> But that's useful information that's told me redundantly by the page title and the banner at the top of the page also. I don't need the URL bar for that.

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.

> How do you distinguish example.edu/financial-aid/ from example.edu/~some-student/

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.

You're making a lot of assumptions there.

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/?

That hypothetical naive first-time user is going to be as fooled by ~financial-aid, or by ~some-user/financial-aid. Showing the full URL path doesn't fix that risk scenario.

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.

> That hypothetical naive first-time user is going to be as fooled by ~financial-aid, or by ~some-user/financial-aid.

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.

> the first thing that strikes you about ~juan-ramirez/financial-aid is that something is wrong because you are not Juan Ramirez

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.

> User studies indicate that the first thing a user notices is... Nothing.

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.

You're using concrete numbers but you don't have the statistics or analysis to know what the numbers are. I'm going to assume the company that has telemetry on its own product does.

... 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...

To improve browser experience all you have to do is use a computer that doesn't suck. The fact that your primary browser is on a tiny phone display is a problem with phones, not with browsers. Browser for phones can evolve to match the disabled nature of their device's but lets hope such gimpings don't filter back into actual desktop computers.

"Spend more money on your computer" is a fine solution for a bay area software engineer. It's not a solution at all for the half of America that would have to sell their car to cover a $400 ER visit.

I make under $12k/year. I live in the midwest. I would have to sell my car for a $1k ER visit.

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.)

You live in the midwest United States; you're not the user we're talking about.

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).

I don't think Chrome can run on a machine like that.

Desktop computers are available waaay cheaper than phones.

I'm actually not thinking about the phone form factor at all. A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space, which leaves more room for chrome extensions.

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.

> A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space, which leaves more room for chrome extensions.

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?

I have a lot of chrome extensions, yes.

To the point where screen space is becoming tight? You are probably something like 0.001% of users.

> misses Google's goals overall.

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.

Agree to disagree, because my primary device is a multi-core desktop with a curved monitor over two feet long and I still think the URL bar takes up too much horizontal space in my browser top bar.

The problem is maybe, a widescreen is bs for most things anyway. In most applications there is so much emtpy space on the left and the right side. I use not just with monitors because of it, they are also height. 43" 4K is nice to work with.

I'm sorry to say, but your a bit naive if you think they're doing it for cosmetic reasons.

1) I'm not generally in the habit of prognosticating all of the reasons a corporation the size of Google tries to do something, especially not when there's an apparent and obvious win possible from the change itself. Minimizing the URL bar leaves room for other things on the page, including chrome extensions and, possibly, page content.

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?

Well I'm exhausted by UI/UX engineers oversimplifying things that are inherently complex. To the point to not really helping people simplifying their work and totally hindering advanced user. There is a reason industrial UI usually don't suffer this, because complex interfaces are there for a reason.

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.

There's a reason most commodity software doesn't adhere to industrial UI standards.

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.