Re:Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chr...
by xg15 on Sunday June 14, 2020 @05:43PM
(#23521636)
Not sure how much actual conspiracy is in there, but I've definitly noticed that the gap between "consumer software" (highly optimized for ease of use but also highly limited and designed with a specific intention how users should interact with it) and "professional software" (powerful and flexible but only usable after extensive training, often command-line only) is widening instead of closing.
There are also definitly conscious design descisions how "cryptic" a particular feature should appear to users. I remember several bugzilla threads with discussion whether a config option should be exposed as an "ordinary" field in the settings or only as an option in about:config, so that normal users won't find it.
Here's a comment I made from several years ago when Chrome tried to do before what it's trying again now (it's not the first time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729
Maybe this next point is starting to go into the realm of conspiracy theory, but I see far too much evidence of it every day: companies are doing this because they don't want users to learn. They want to keep users naive, docile, and compliant, and thus easier to "herd" for their purposes. They don't want people knowing the truth behind how things work; they would rather "developers" (and only those who explicitly chose to be one --- probably for monetary reasons) learn from their officially sanctioned documentation (which does not tell the whole truth), and not think or discover for themselves.
(I've memorised most of printable ASCII because I did a lot of Asm programming decades ago, so I instantly understood what you mean.)