Re:The short tale of an online scam
by horsawlarway on Thursday July 01, 2021 @09:20AM
(#27698775)
I think the reason was mostly AMP.
Hiding/obscuring details from the URL bar seems like much less of a big deal if the goal is to rehost someone else's content. The value statement of the URL goes down a lot in that case, and the push to drive users away from it starts to make sense.
Either which way, I still hate it - The only non-work related ticket I've put in for chromium was a request for an option to disable this behavior entirely.
It's bad form from folks who should know better.
Re:The short tale of an online scam
by throaway3141593 on Thursday July 01, 2021 @06:27PM
(#27705649)
> I think the reason was mostly AMP.
Safari on both mobile and desktop started doing this years before AMP was a thing.
Re:The short tale of an online scam
by throaway3141593 on Thursday July 01, 2021 @06:24PM
(#27705629)
Safari has been doing this for years. The justification is partly because it makes the domain more obvious, especially on a mobile device where you have limited screen width. https://www.netflix.com.evilcorp.com would simply show up as evilcorp.com if only the domain is shown.
Suggesting Google might do anything without ad-related motives is probably too generous, but I've always thought that this was an optimisation in the sense that it's built on optimism: when everything's working well, most of what's in the URL bar is irrelevant. So the bar is built towards working well in the best case, at the expense of becoming much less useful in the worse (and probably more common) case.