Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr... by shadowgovt on Sunday June 14, 2020 @11:48AM (#23518563)

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."

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Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr... by mthoms on Sunday June 14, 2020 @02:48PM (#23520176)

>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.

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Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr... by shadowgovt on Sunday June 14, 2020 @03:43PM (#23520694)

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.

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Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr... by freeflight on Sunday June 14, 2020 @01:16PM (#23519435)

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...

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Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr... by shadowgovt on Sunday June 14, 2020 @03:44PM (#23520703)

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

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