We are going back to AOL days. That didn’t work out so well for AOL in the long run. It’s kind of crazy to me you can’t do marketing now without at least discussing Google and Facebook these days.

Edit: at least you knew you were the customer with AOL and paid them with clear terms for access.

The only difference is that Google has endlessly more clout and depth than AOL and my fear is that where AOL failed, Google may succeed.

With Firefox succumbing this week, this is pretty horrible.

I’m not a Richard Stallman type, but I think it’s come to the point where if you have even the slightest pretense of being a “free web” person, using Chrome or a Chromium-based browser has become unconscionable. This company is playing embrace extend extinguish to a T and they are nearing the end game.

I switched to Firefox this year and so can you! Just download it, install it, and then clear your Chrome history so it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Firefox is really nice and I was surprised that I don’t miss Chrome at all (except for the developer tools color picker).

> I’m not a Richard Stallman type, but I think it’s come to the point where if you have even the slightest pretense of being a “free web” person, using Chrome or a Chromium-based browser has become unconscionable.

Thanks for phrasing it like this - I'm also not a Richard Stallman type but it's hard to disagree with this statement. Just downloaded Firefox and made the switch.

Great to hear.

Clearing my history/sessions in Chrome was an important factor in adoption for me as well. It helps that when you start typing in that search bar, it doesn’t feel familiar. Took a few weeks but did eventually stop looking to Chrome. Now I just use it for testing/Android debugging.

I have this shell script as `chrome-new` in my path for testing in Chrome and the rare site that is broken in Firefox. It gives me a totally clean profile each time to minimize the amount of Google spying that goes on and reduce my tendency to use the browser for anything but the current task. Sadly despite --no-make-default-browser, it still asks me with an infobar every time I start it.

    #!/bin/sh
    test -e "$(which chromium)" && CHROME="chromium"
    test -e "$(which google-chrome)" && CHROME="google-chrome"
    test -e "$(which google-chrome-dev)" && CHROME="google-chrome-dev"
    TMPDIR=`mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX`
    $CHROME --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-make-default-browser "$@"
    rm -rf $TMPDIR

Don't you get the same thing using Guest Mode?

AFAIK guest mode acts like incognito when it comes to storage behavior (changes stay in-memory and are not persisted to disk, and therefore available storage is noticeably lower than with a regular profile), so it will trigger incognito mode detection scripts on some times.

That's awesome thanks for sharing.

I've been using Firefox/Safari on my personal devices for a couple years now, but as a web developer I unfortunately can't not use Chrome at work because of its dev tools. I try to test on other browsers when I have time - I've always made a point to push for supporting at least Firefox, as an organization - but when I'm iterating I really just need the Chrome tools. Firefox's tools always remained one or two steps behind, and now that they fired their dev tools team I assume they won't even be doing that, soon.

The same goes for Google Search/DuckDuckGo. I use the latter on my personal devices, but when I'm tracking down a problem at work I just need the thing that's going to work the best.

I agree about DDG, but not dev tools.

I used to think they weren’t as good, but they are good. And I think I’m a pretty serious dev tools user.

BUT, if you want to keep using Chrome dev tools that doesn’t mean you can’t switch to FF. Just de-personalize Chrome (clear you history, sessions, settings etc) and then you’ll stop using it. Say you’re developing and open a new tab to search something on SO: you won’t be logged in on SO. Same goes with any site. So you’ll instantly realize you’re using Chrome to browse and hop over to FF instead.

Seems like a lot of work but it’s not. Maybe I drank the kool aid but I now feel naked browsing with Chrome and try to avoid it as much as possible. I think the important thing is to stop using Chrome for personal browsing.

I disagree about DDG :). For work-related searches I'm really satisfied with the results and I find answers quickly. I would even go as far as to say that it works better for me than Google's search. I experienced it the other way around. When using DDG for personal use or results about local things I often tend to use the Google bang as Google has the better localized results.

I use Firefox as my daily drive, and I still don't get what's so special about Chrome's dev tools, I test on Chrome and open the dev tools but I prefer Firefox overall. It's a damn shame they fired the Dev Tools team however, that is not a visionary move on Mozilla's part.

Depending on your IDE, you can make it just open Chrome when you boot up web projects. That's what I do, but I do normal browsing on Firefox, it helps keep distractions away even. Leaving Chrome with only work related things.

Some of it may just be familiarity, but it always seems like there are little things that aren't all the way there. Some of the CSS property selectors aren't as rich, last I checked the profiling tools weren't as powerful, that kind of stuff. Things you could live without, but I feel a certain amount of responsibility when I'm on the clock to not hamper my productivity by using a tool that isn't the best one available.

Some things this is still true, other things I don't think I could go back to chrome devel tools, it just feels weak and old by comparison now.

> I unfortunately can't not use Chrome at work because of its dev tools

Why? I’m a full time developer at a Fortune 100 company and I have no issues just using the Firefox dev tools. I literally never use the Chrome dev tools. Though, this might soon change now that Mozilla has laid off the dev tool team.

Did they really fire their devtools team?? I'm sorry, I missed that earlier.

You should share how Safari and Firefox handle URLs, rather than feeding into everyone's reactions

Consider also changing your default search to StartPage or Duck Duck Go

Yes. For sure. Sadly I find myself g!-ing all the time but good to at least try them first. Sometimes I g! and go back, which always feels serendipitous.

"With Firefox succumbing this week..."

Firefox succumbed to what? Genuinely curious, i had not heard this.

There were a large number of layoffs at Mozilla, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 .

And strategic re-orientation as I understood it.

Same way you strategically deprive someone from food and they reorient to a coffin user.

Explanation: Google undermined FireFox, both through ads, then through a series of incompatibilities.

And they did the same to Edge, which is using Chromium.

Given the caliber of the talent that was let go, this re-orientation sounds more like a lobotomy.

That's exactly what any CEO or "Downsizing Consultant" would say. That may be an OK situation for a corporate company, but for a non-profit foundation like Mozilla, its unhealthy and rings some disaster bells.

Too many overpaid people who had little interest in building a web browser.

Color picker seems to work great in the CSS Properties at least :D

Works great but Chrome’s lets you change HSL and other modes. I like the ability to tweak luminance or saturation right in the browser.

I’ll add my voice to that, I’ve been using Firefox as primary dev browser for a couple of years now and it’s a perfectly cromulent choice. I don’t miss Chrome one iota, far from it; when firing up Chrome to investigate browser-specific issues it seems alien now.

My level of respect for origin was similarly the tie-breaker when choosing between Vue, Angular, and React.

Its the opposite. They are on a down slope to irrelevance.

All these moves just turns up the temperature of the innovation cauldron, speeding up the pace of whatever will replace them.

More clout and depth has nothing to do with longevity. See every Empire that has evaporated in History.

Google will fail faster than it took most empires too for 2 reasons

1. Things move much faster these days. The time between rise and fall keeps shrinking for large orgs struggling to cope with the furious pace of change.

2. Complexity of playing empire defense grows exponentially with scale. You can't find enough skilled people quick enough. You cant solve increasingly complex issues with just your cash hoard. You can't escape increasing internal politics that slows the speed of innovation within. You can't escape external actors mistrusting every small move made etc etc etc.

So they will keep making such moves. And there is a way to speed up their decline - Encourage them and praise them for whatever they come up with.

Chrome sucks and hasn’t gotten the love it used to

The problem is that there are simply no good free browsers that are not Chromium-based or Firefox. It doesn't seem viable or worthwhile to write a web rendering engine from the ground up. We're heading rapidly towards a Blink/Webkit monoculture.

Why exclude FF? It’s good.

Currently. Though Mozilla is giving no clear plans on continuing the projects importance. If anything it seems Mozilla is planning for an eventual sunset. Hoping to have revenue alternatives for when Firefox is irrelevant and they stop supporting it.

Firing a team building a meaningful advancement in Firefox's tech stack is a big signal, imo.

Is it possible that if Mozilla folded or stopped supporting Firefox that the open-source community would continue to support it?

Possible, but not to a sufficient extent to keep up with the ever changing needs.

Yeah that was devastating this week but maybe it can somehow reverse itself, I don’t know.

Why would we want a continuation of what isn’t working.

Let it die, rebuild from the ruins.

It's pretty good, albeit much less good since the old XPCOM extension support went away. (My position is that XPCOM compatibility could have been maintained in a multi-process world through better dynamic object proxying.) But as Mozilla's money dries up, so will Gecko, Servo, and a bunch of other fascinating projects. It's sad. But the web won't stop evolving, so we're going to end up a webkit-only world.

I use Firefox for casual browsing but heavy workloads need a better browser. So I have to use Chromium.

Firefox is a much more performant browser for actually rendering heavy pages.

I have 18 windows open in Firefox vs chromium that say otherwise. Why would I lie lol.

Chrome has a more responsive UI, but as for actually rendering and laying out pages, Firefox is usually much faster.

I've actually checked with both browsers open side-by-side while developing my own webapps.

What's worse, Chrome is super buggy and will often randomly crash on complex CSS or too many table rows, etc.

That's great, I'll tell Firefox that,maybe it will pep up.

And what about memory requirements? Also there are no addons in mobile Chrome!! Big issue for me.

I have 64GB of RAM because I know the workload is memory hungry. But still, I have enough left over: https://imgur.com/a/Q25P7vJ

The comparison to AOL was my first thought also.

Basically, Google have lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.

They became the villain when they started deliberately positioning the ads on their search results screen to trick people. Which I'm sure makes them lots and lots of money but is definitely evil.

Google is many different companies and products, and some of them I'm so grateful for. They provide a simple product that does something magically better than the competition, don't screw with the recipe. I give them my data because I like the service.

But the company-wide decision to manipulate the URL as a business strategy drains all my enthusiasm. The "U" is really important! The URL is basically a filename that you use to access the data store called the Internet. Don't take it away from me by the brute force of market dominance. I need to be sure of where I'm addressing my packets. Don't tamper with that essential construct.

I use both browsers, but without Firefox, I'd be lost in the wilderness. With its recent layoffs I'm worried about the web.

Is it really a company-wide strategy to manipulate the URL? The Chrome change was based on user studies that showed that people do not understand URLs.

The days of URLs as a data access key are gone. So many other things (cookies, etc) go into controlling what pages show that what was originally a 1:1 mapping between URL and content is now a many to many mapping. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's the web we live in now.

Doesn't matter if they understand it or not. It's the one and only barrier between you and malicious actors, or you and a monopolist. And oh look there's Google, attacking the one thing that protects the world from their ownership of the web.

People might not understand how a seat belt works, it's still there and we still use them.

Do you happen to have a link to those studies?

> I give them my data because I like the service.

They take your data and everyone's regardless of if you want them too. That you don't mind hardly makes that better.

> The comparison to AOL was my first thought also

It doesn't really make sense, though. The AOL thing was always things like "visit AOL keyword lord of the rings" at the end of trailers, and that would take you to the marketing site.

If Chrome wanted to do that, in the example gif the keyword wouldn't be just "en.wikipedia.org" for the URL article, it would be something like "wikipedia URL" that would bring you back to the page you're on through a google search.

It isn't that Google built a faithful recreation of AOL's mechanism. The claim is that Google is in a very similar ecosystem position with very similar incentives to attempt to Own All The Traffic.

I realize hindsight bias is at work, but I think I preferred Microsoft playing the Shitbag Monopolist role. They weren't passive aggressive about it, at least.

I'd say that it's just as common to hear "google Our Brand" as "www.brand.com" at the end of television adverts now. That's entirely anecdotal, but Google (or other search engines, but basically Google) has been for a long time the way to access sites.

I see people every day searching for a brand and clicking rather than appending ".com". It's more convenient. If Google can profit off laziness, they will.

I tend to search the brandname if I'm not sure about what the domain is. There's quite a few Dutch brands that are either on .nl or .com. Or their brand is already in use by another company, so they've got some extra text in theirs. Or their name has a & in it and they might use "n" "en" or "and" in their actual domain.

Google doesn't like you using the term "google <something>" because that opens the door towards a genericized trademark (like xerox or cellophane), but plenty of advertisers buy keywords or a phrase on Google and then use terms like "search for <keyword or phrase> to find out more" in their radio/TV/outdoor ads.

I'm not sure if it's entirely laziness. Unless given a URI through some other medium, you can't expect to find a business by simply appending .com, .org, .net. there are only so many viable names in this structure and collisions are inevitable.

At one time, there were less organizations online but now, almost every single business, large or small, has a web presence over viable domain name scarcity.

As such, discovery service online is a necessity. Google and other search engines fill that void. Now should they completely replace domains? Probably not, at least not yet, but some other addressing scheme needs to exist if we want to be less reliant on services like Google. Personally, I just use other search engines. If I'm not finding results I fall back to Google.

The thing you mentioned doesn't like it's too far fetched for the next step :-)

I dunno, AOL was extremely successful and people loved it. I'm not ashamed to say I liked it, having everything in the same window. Google could only hope to achieve that fluidity. Messaging, Email, and web all in one workspace.

AOL really only declined because of the rise in high speed internet, and their awful business model and practices.

The market also offered better services eventually and AOL simply couldn't keep up in every area. It slowly chipped away at their user base. Messaging was one of their killer features and apps like ICQ slowly ate them up while AOL tried to ride the same strategy of being everything to everyone into the future. I do agree it was a great experience for what it was, back in the day.

AOL bought ICQ in the very early days of messaging.

AOL had a particular mismanagement problem that Google doesn't have.

AOL didn't lack depth: they literally had email (@aol.com), social media (AIM), video-calling (Vonage), cloud filesharing (Xdrive) and so much more.

Ultimately, they failed because (1) they were overvalued to begin with and (2) had a bad innovation model (top-down) that led them to (a) over-commit to online ads and (b) under-commit to broadband.

Google is sustainable & mature, and it has a distributed innovation model that will avoid the particular mistakes of AOL.

Google is reacting to the Walled Garden trend, not driving it.

> Google is reacting to the Walled Garden trend, not driving it.

I could follow you right up to that bit.

Yea, actually fair, bit of a non-sequitur.

I meant to say that Google is well-positioned to take advantage of being a Walled Garden, and is doing so now because the model is being built out out elsewhere, both domestically (Apple, Amazon) and abroad (WeChat, Jio).

Facebook and Apple have been driving those trends for well over a decade.

Do you or anyone else have a video or screenshots of what you're talking about? Or is there a specific name of the product where AOL was doing this?

Instead of browsing via URL, companies could buy "AOL keywords". A user could just put in a keyword, like "dog food", and AOL would send them to a particular dog food page. In the days before good search engines, this was very convenient even though it was obviously pay-to-play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1npzZu83AfU

"Hi, I'm Sheriff Harry S. Truman for America Online"

When dial up Internet was a thing, AOL was the leader in that universe. It was basically one of the earliest walled gardens out there. They had their own chat, email, etc. You accessed it all through their desktop client. You never had to leave the AOL application to experience "the internet". They of course were still providing general Internet access, so you could still fire up Netscape [and earlier browsers] and cruise to whatever websites you wanted. The Internet eventually eclipsed what AOL could offer for most people and their premium price and sometimes dodgy Internet service eventually fell by the wayside to a more open Internet experience for most users.

Edit: AIM was a really popular messaging client for years after the fall of AOL as a premiere dial up Internet service.

To amplify that a bit, AOL started out as a pre-Internet online service, competing with the likes of Prodigy and Compuserve. It wasn't until 1993 ("Eternal September") that they opened up Internet access to their users.

Movie trailers often had them, sometimes long after AOL had declined in relative popularity. An example I mentioned in another comment was at the end of one of the lord of the rings trailers:

https://youtu.be/V75dMMIW2B4?t=143

I have no idea how popular they ever were, but I'm sure there's a large segment of people that find it easier to remember and to type in "Lord of the Rings" into their computer than "www.lordoftherings.net".

This is off-topic slippery-slope hysterics that have nothing to do with the story

It seems like we've reached that already. I've seen TV ads where they just say "Search for $KEYWORD" instead of a URL (admittedly that's more average-user friendly than making them input dots and slashes). Or posters that have [f]/someFacebookPageName or [i]/instagramUsername with the icons to indicate Facebook/Instagram.

I encourage everyone to use Firefox on Android just for the one killer feature of being able to install the full desktop ublock origin plugin.

The recent mobile Firefox is worse in every way that matters to me:

  ° Breaking recent add-ons (for the few add-ons that exist). I added a close-tab icon to compensate for the bad tab-ui. It's gone now.
  ° URL-bar hiding is wonkey. Some overlays disable hiding due to recent phising attacks. Now, for overlays, it is always present and hides the bottom of the page. This is very annoying when links are hidden behind the bar.
  ° URL bar (2): where have my bookmarks gone?
  ° URL bar (3): no more editing the URL if anything was *ever* searched in the current tab. Instead it edits the search. The URL is inaccessible. 
  ° After 'Open in new tab' there is an annoying delay for 'Switch' again hiding links.
  ° Tab selection is just bad now. Preview is broken. If anything is displayed, it is often the image of two sites ago, even if the page has rendered.
  ° Tab selection (2) no more moving the tabs?
  ° Tab selection (3) why waste so much space? Using only 80% of the screen. And every tab wastes two lines and a half of useful space. Why is only the domain shown? Why not truncated or cut in the middle? 
  ° Tab selection (4): newly opened tabs are hidden, you always have to scroll up as the current tab is always first, older tabs are lower.
  ° about:config is broken. Certificate error. Certificate error is broken too. Thus no disabling reader mode.

These are papercuts, every day, every time I use Firefox. /rant

On the other hand, Chrome for Android killing off Duet a few weeks ago has made it actively painful every time I need to switch tabs.

Yes!! When I see other people browsing on Android without uBlock I'm in awe of their patience.

With Blockada, you can block lots of stuff at the DNS level, so it's more tolerable. But it doesn't block everything, uBlock is smarter. Still I keep it running, it's especially great for all the other apps trying to talk to ad or analytics servers. (I'd actually like to combine Blockada and NoRoot Firewall though...)

I use an old phone (until Librem ships...) and I switch back and forth between Chrome Beta and Firefox... they each piss me off. Firefox is slow, I've tried the newer fenix system and it's not really better, plus it crashes a lot. Especially on sites like mobile twitter, probably in part because of the overhead of uBlock having to fix up the DOM; essentially the crash is a failure in handling a system out of memory error in a low level part of the graphics stack that mobile chrome had a long time ago too but managed to fix years ago. Recently chrome pissed me off more because when I tried to take a screenshot of a tweet with a funny google translation, chrome+android colluded to block it because of some issue like "the display contains protected DRM content." Firefox, no issue, apart from crashing 10 minutes later. At least I haven't lost my tabs to a Firefox crash (mobile or PC) for many, many years.

Have you ever tried installing Bromite or vanilla Chromium from F-Droid?

I imagine they'd address at least some of your qualms with Chrome.

I tried. Tab switching was - for me - horrible compared to Chrome (chrome:swipe down, swipe address bar down, select tab you want from carousel).

I kept looking if i missed this obvious feature. I tried to live without it, but Firefox mobile's tab switching just turned out to be a deal breaker for me.

If anyone had some tips: please!! I'd vastly prefer using FF on mobile.

Tab switching on Firefox Nightly is much better as of a week or so ago. You can now swipe left and right on the address bar to go between tabs, just like in Chrome. It's particularly nice when the address bar is on the bottom.

Cool. Long time firefox user here and that was a useful discovery for me

Thanks! That convinces me to give it a shot.

This has been reworked in https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi.... The URL bar is now at the bottom of the screen, including the tab switch button which is now always within reach of your thumb.

On the other hand, I didn't have a problem with tapping the tab select button in the non-beta app, where it's in exactly the same position as it is in Chrome...

Oh how I hate the new Firefox experience on Android. I'll still use it because hey it's Firefox, but it's really eating me up...</digression>

URL bar on the bottom sounds amazing :) I'm all in favor of moving all toolbars, search fields, any sort of interactive controls to the bottom on mobile interfaces. So much easier than having to reach to the top of the screen at random, even if it isn't always thumbable.

The position is configurable. There is a setting that will allow you to move it back where it "belongs".

Good point, address bar on the bottom may not even be the default. I think it makes great sense though. Looking forward to the current Firefox Beat replacing the main Firefox app so I can free up a lot of space on my phone... :)

This is the problem with the whole industry right now.

How Google win - and they do it with many of their products - is that they bother to make their products just superior enough to the competition, that you basically have no choice but to use their product, unless you want a deliberately inferior experience.

It's not just Chrome vs. Firefox, which I'm very sad about. Another big example for me is on my iPhone. Google's GBoard is simply superior to anything else I've ever tried, and yet I know it's spying on absolutely everything I'm typing on the device (pre-encryption), at all times, and it even bullies me into staying online if I want the keyboard to work fully properly. (It's slower and the prediction stuff doesn't work half as well if I'm in flight mode for whatever reason.)

when you have blokada, ublock doesn't make much sense.

why block ads on a browser when you can do it on a system-wide level.

unless you need the vpn connection for work or something like that.

uBlock Origin can block a lot more things than a DNS-based blocker can. Some websites load ads from the same domains they load content from.

With Firefox axing the entire Servo team along with a bunch of other technical people, I am very afraid for its future in terms of technical development. Especially for the macOS version, that so far has always been the red-headed stepchild.

It’s got me in quite a pickle since the only alternative that is privacy friendly and cross platform (macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) is Brave, and Brave, despite good or at least decent intentions, has done some questionable things.

Servo wasn't even the main engine.

Considering their main revenue sources will likely be decimated, it makes sense to focus resources on the primary browser engine, and allow the open source community to build out the experimental features, moving temporary resources there as needed.

The thing with Open Source is that even if Mozilla Corp goes under, all of us can continue building out Firefox like a regular open source project. Or the Linux foundation could pick it up, etc.

That's literally how Firefox was created in the first place, as an open source continuation of the Netscape browser.

Using Firefox will lead to improvements that will persist even beyond Mozilla Corp. In the meanwhile, Mozilla Corp can be looked at as an experiment to commercially and profitably develop Firefox, which, if it fails, will require us to switch to the non commercial models that are driving several other open source projects.

The way to guarantee a future without an alternative browser is to not use an alternative browser.

I hear you, but simultaneously everyone (including me) has a certain limit to which they will be principled. If it happens like I mentioned, I will jump ship. On macOS, Firefox still guzzles battery compared to Chromium browsers. This seemed like a thing that, whilst not fixed, was actively being worked on. If I had to hazard a guess, that will slip heavily in priority now.

Who knows. The best way to vote is to be an active user of the product and give feedback that power use should be a priority.

I don't think this is true at all. If anything, this change actually hurts AMP because now none of the original host url is visible at first.

I don't like browsers that do this, its the first thing I turn off in Safari, but how does Apple manage to get away hiding the full path under positive intent, but when Google does it its because they're evil?

I think it's pretty fair to say that the wider population of users aren't very good at determining which part of the URL is the authority, so any change to help with that can only be positive imho.

> I don't like browsers that do this, its the first thing I turn off in Safari, but how does Apple manage to get away hiding the full path under positive intent, but when Google does it its because they're evil?

I don’t like it either, but I assume the difference arises from the fact that Google would benefit from deemphasizing the URL and has done work already in faking it, while Apple probably does it because it looks clean and it thinks its users will be tricked by apple.com.help-virus-14682825821&824826.

To play the devil's advocate, Apple's Safari has been hiding full addresses for quite a while, without having any direct benefit as a company as far as I know.

It only does this on mobile, as far as I can tell; using desktop Safari as my primary browser, I'm not seeing this.

It does it on desktop too. You must’ve disabled in it settings

Apple has it's own goals of hiding technical information from the user.

hmm, the only thing it hides for me is the protocol, and that one is easy understand: a padlock shown: https. "Not Secure":http.

To get what you're seeing, I had to turn on the option to see the full URL. Otherwise it just shows the domain. That was several years ago though, so maybe it's no the default anymore.

I get it though, most people really only care about the domain and in fact, trimming everything else makes the actual domain easier to spot when it's not the domain you wanted, such as in a phishing attempt.

Safari has little to none marketshare.

17% is little to none?

More like 3% on the desktop. Mobile is not really relevant here. The URL bar on those devices is obviously shorter to begin with because of less display width. So just showing the hostname is not much different than showing the hostname + 5 characters.

Reminds me of a great phishing attack I saw the other year:

"https://support.google.com.verify.x82loo2a.com"

Of course, in a tiny url bar, you'd just see "https://support.google.com.veri".

It need not be malice. It maybe because the design people think people are too stupid to understand URLs.

As other comment mentioned, Safari does it too.

The trend seems to be abstracting away stuff like filesystem. Many people I know don't even organize stuff into folders on their phones. Everyone seems to dump everything in Download or something like that. The existence of separate applications for Music, Video and Photo content makes it irrelevant to some extent.

> It maybe because the design people think people are too stupid to understand URLs

You may be right, but it's hard to see why this would be a concern in 2020. The number of users who have actually grown up with URLs in their childhood increases all the time.

Anecdotally, it seems computer literacy is actually dropping over time. I taught an entry-level scripting course aimed at medical graduate students for several years, and each year the number of students who did not comprehend even the concept of files and folders was higher than the previous year.

That's entirely our industry's fault. After all, there are no files anymore, just cloud documents on remote websites.

And we didn’t reproduce the hierarchical nature of files in the cloud, rather we have flat lists, tags, sort-by-recently-opened, etc.

However, flat structures are harder to use, and people tend to use Google Docs less than the shared network folders when Word existed.

I don't think dealing with files made people any more computer literate, nor is understanding the folder/file UI abstraction any more of a badge of tech literacy than understanding what "pull to refresh" might do on an iPhone.

We like to overdramatize the importance of computer literacy because we take it for granted that computers are our livelihood, not some principled quest of self-betterment to understand the world.

We're like a group of mechanics finishing each other's sentences over how everyone should know how a carburetor works, and then circlejerking over how we "failed the people" with the move to power steering. And don't even get us started on how push-button ignition set the public's car literacy back 100 years from the golden age of turning a key to really understand the inner workings of locomotion.

We failed by no longer giving anyone the ability or even the right to understand their tools. A computer is just a tool to get things done. It's perfectly reasonable that to a lot of people, it will remain this black box of magic they'll never understand. But now it's a black box to everyone, including non-technical people who cared enough to know more about their tools even if they weren't their primary interest.

It feels to me that tech will eventually hit a point where there's only two ways to interact with it. Either you're a "typical user" who has a glass orb you speak into and pray that it does what you ask without shattering to prevent tinkering, or you're a programmer who gets a command line and that's it.

Growing up with computers as a new thing that most adults didn't understand, the majority of people who understood them were children. I also thought that as computers were everywhere, children after me would all understand them, but that didn't happen.

With ubiquitous computing, the ratio of children who understand to children who don't is a little higher than when I grew up, but not that much. Clearly, some children grew up with me who were willing didn't get the skills because they had no access, but lots of kids are either need directed instruction to attain technical literacy, or are unwilling or incapable of attaining it.

Kids aren’t any more computer literate. Computers (ahem... phones) have just gotten way easier to use

> The number of users who have actually grown up with URLs in their childhood increases all the time.

Where do kids growing up with iPads even see a URL?

You’d be shocked how bad they even are at using a physical keyboard and trackpad in 2020

If that conspiracy theory is true, what reason does Apple have to do this exact same thing on iOS Safari?

It looks marginally cleaner.

Specifically how does this change benefit Google?

The security problems that it addresses are very concrete and specific. I can clearly see how this change helps novice users.

How does this change benefit Google? It seems very hand-wavy.

Edit: downvotes, but no explanation of any specific benefit to Google from this change

It's been explained elsewhere in the thread.

Link? I can't find anyone to actually explain how truncating the URL actually benefits Google's business. Comparisons to AOL are very hand-wavy.

Seems unlikely, considering they're also pushing for signed exchange (SGX) which also does the same thing.

Reason number 368 why I've moved everything to Safari + DuckDuckGo. I still can't believe they won the suit with Genius and being caught poaching their content for their own representation

>AMP

Tangentially related: on mobile, I've been having a good time with Firefox with this plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

A good anti-trust investigation and subsequent break up of the company should fix this problem.

> Chrome for Android already modifies the address bar on AMP pages

How does it do this? The URL looks totally as I'd expect (google.com/amp/) - I'm on version 84.0

They are boiling frogs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Little changes over time, so you don't see the end game right away. Signed exchanges and further hacking up / hiding the URL will come. This change only hides some of the URL, with a hover action that shows it again.

I swear that with AMP there will come a time when we're faced with another "Digg Bar" like situation but worse. Boiling frog indeed.

I really don't get why people think that signed exchanges are this super nefarious plot to destroy the open web when it's exactly the thing that would make a distributed web possible.

Disconnecting content authorship and publishing with hosting so that literally anyone can host web content securely is fantastic!

* Want to bootstrap your IPFS network? You can safely and securely host a huge chunk of the web from big publishers on day 0.

* Want to compete with AMP? Now you can because AMP isn't special anymore!

* Are you a small ISP that wants to cache web pages close to your customers to reduce bandwidth usage?

* Archiving website has never been easier since they're already bundled and packed.

We've already reached the point where the content you're seeing and the server you're connecting to are completely disconnected. Signed exchanges just democratize the process instead of requiring every publisher to pick a CDN.

I don't think most of the people angry about signed exchanges necessarily want a distributed web (everyone hosts), they want the old decentralized model (many servers with different content). They want Google to stop telling them how to format their website, and they want Google to stop rehosting their website as a condition of search-engine access. That last one in particular isn't a centralization issue as much as it is a copyright concern. If people are angry about technology that makes it easier for Google to proxy their content, they sure as shit aren't going to want technology that lets randos do it too.

Not to mention, the decentralized web also means more privacy concerns. In the old model, the only entity that knows you downloaded a particular file is the server you talk to. With AMP, Google is now involved with that data flow. This is a third reason why people hate AMP, but it could be worse. Google is at least still a moderately trustworthy entity for a lot of people. However, what about Archive.org? What about Amazon, Facebook, ByteDance, or Brave Software? Each entity has far different trust implications compared to Google. You may trust them more or less. Just signing the web content only validates that the content itself hasn't been tampered with, not that the place you got it from is going to have your privacy interests in mind.

All of which can be done without AMP, hiding the url, or forcing companies to use it or lose their SEO placements.

It's the SUM of the pieces that point to Google's endgame, not the individual pieces themselves.

I have an idea.

Move forward with signed exchanges, and then prohibit them from being used to obscure the content source (more specifically, require the 3rd party to reveal themselves)

I mean I don't disagree with you that I should be able to look and see what entity actually served me the content in the same way I can see who signed the sites SSL cert but I'm still 100% in favor of having browsers present display the bundle's URL in the browser because that's the site your viewing.

A site that uses Cloudflare as a CDN isn't cloudflare.com/site/nyt.com. The whole point of these things is that if you have some vested interest in being a CDN for chunks of the web for your users you don't have to set up a partnership with them and proxy their site or have their certs you just download the bundle and go.

I detest AMP, but I'm very much looking forward to signed exchanges.

It's the combo of SXG and AMP, and not what that combo can do today, but what it could do.

> I really don't get why people think that signed exchanges are this super nefarious plot to destroy the open web

My biggest concern is that the request will go to a google-owned server, where google can fully track me, and my browser would be lying to me about being on a non-google estate I might assume be free from Google’s tracking.

Site-owners will now also be forced to buy into Google Analytics since they have no requests in their own server-logs to analyse.

It’s a power-grab. And obviously google is doing this to increase their ability to do full internet-wide tracking.

> My biggest concern is that the request will go to a google-owned server, where google can fully track me.

I'm not exactly sure what the fear here is. You're only getting to the page by clicking a link in Google Search and then your browser fetches a bundle from Google's servers.

In your ideal world you would click a link in Google Search, telling Google what you're looking at, and then connect to the site via Cloudflare, and the source site's servers telling them too?

The flip side to these is that your browser can actually act as your agent with this. If you find yourself a nice privacy-respecting CDN then your browser can try to pull from there when you click any link and you now have way less exposure.

Requires implementation from the amp site as well I think, but here's the spec they introduced to allow for it: https://caniuse.com/#feat=sxg

It's called signed exchanges.

https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...

You can also use an ad blocking DNS, it's been working great for me

Yep. The Internet is now "The Google."

agreed 100%

Google revenue is slowly going down

Only option for Google is to pretend Internet doesn't exist

Anyone who is using Adwords or doing Search Engine Optimization

look at what results look like

It's 50% to 70% traffic being routed to Google

remaining being routed mostly to people who pay a lot to Adwords

*

It's almost purely Pay to Play now in most of the lucrative areas

> Google revenue is slowly going down

Perhaps you mean their revenue growth is slowing? Because they're actually seeing pretty healthy year-over-year revenue increases: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

they posted 2% decline in revenue in Q2 2020, which is not included into your graph.