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Chrome Experiments with URL-less Web

posted by Woods on Thursday May 01 2014, @07:37PM   
from the now-all-those-URLs-I-memorized-are-worthless dept.

Ja'Achan writes:

Yesterday, a Canary build of Google Chrome removed something kind of important from the browser: the URL. Basically, it only shows the domain and leaves the rest of the URL bar as a search field.

Allen Pike, a blogger who writes "about technology and crap like that" suggests burying the URL like this will probably have some usability and security benefits. From the article:

More recently, browsers started hiding the URL scheme. http:// was no more, as far as most users were concerned. In iOS 7, Mobile Safari went even further and hid everything about the URL except the domain. With the Chrome "origin chip" change, the URL will move out of the field entirely, to a tidy little button that many users will never even realize is clickable.

• Re:Regression to the mean (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 02 2014, @05:56AM

  by kaszz (4211) on Friday May 02 2014, @05:56AM (#38764) Journal

  Make the UI transparent if it hurts simple brains all the better as it will have a self cleaning effect ;-)

  Parent

• Re:Regression to the mean Re:Regression to the mean (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:04AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:04AM (#38777)

  Not that I am defending this but think about this.

  Look to the url right now that you can see for this message. It is basically a domain, (http if you bothered to turn it back on), then a bunch of gobbly gook. Yep to most people in the 'real world' most URLs are meaningless. Some are crazy long that dont even fit in the edit control. Full of question marks slashes and commands that only the person who wrote the site knows what it really means.

  I can see this making sense to do. However, so long as I have the option to turn it off and put it back easily. That is the mark of a good GUI. Let me do dumb things but give me a good 'best path' for the other cases.

  Parent

  • Re:Regression to the mean (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @01:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @01:26AM (#39141)

    What we on soylentnews should do is make sure that our url's do not look like gobblygook!

    While the current ones are not that bad, it can certainly be made better. Lets take a look,
    the article have this one
    http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/01/142 8233 [soylentnews.org]
    seems to be an date (but isn't date standard supposed to have - instead?) and then some article id number 1428233. Isn't the date on it redundant if it have an id? wouldn't something like just http://soylentnews.org/article-1428233 [soylentnews.org] be better?

    When I at first clicked to show just your comment the url explodes into
    http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1608&thresh old=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=38746#38777 [soylentnews.org]

    Kind of long right? and hard to read, and what worse, it haves a different article id! (or at least if my guess that sid is article id (s?), and pid is comment id (p???), well not your comments id but actually the thread I guess because you comment is #38777

    I'm not sure why it added "&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread" there when they're default. Actually http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1608&pid=38 746#38777 [soylentnews.org] show the same thing (well... the scroll down to #38777 actually worked now)
    And yeah what I really wanted to go to was http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1608&pid=38 777 [soylentnews.org]

    A bit more readable could perhaps be something like
    http://soylentnews.org/article-1608/comment-38777 [soylentnews.org]
    (and *if* using a nondefault sorting/mode/threshold put that after ?sort=score or whatever)

    and on this reply-page instead of http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1608&op=Rep ly&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=38777 [soylentnews.org]

    just have the url be
    http://soylentnews.org/article-1608/comment-38777/ reply [soylentnews.org]

    Parent