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Google Resumes its Senseless Attack on the URL Bar, Hides Full Addresses on Chrome 85

posted by chromas on Monday June 15 2020, @10:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the AOL dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/12/google-resumes-its-senseless-attack-on-the-url-bar-hides-full-addresses-on-chrome-canary/

Google has tried on and off for years to hide full URLs in Chrome's address bar, because apparently long web addresses are scary and evil. Despite the public backlash that came after every previous attempt, Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name.

A few new feature flags have appeared in Chrome's Dev and Canary channels (V85), which modify the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar. The main flag is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name. For example, "https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5-chromebook-review/" is simply displayed as "androidpolice.com."

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 15 2020, @01:39PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) on Monday June 15 2020, @01:39PM (#1008120)

    The question isn't really if Google should be broken up, but if their shitty monolithic app Chrome should be broken up.

    Nobody bitches about the renderer not being good, or the javascript interpreter not being good enough. Its a continuous stream of complaints that google can't do UI, chrome UI has always sucked and all changes ever made were "retrograde improvements".

    Now a library of "render this URL into a window" could be wrapped with a variety of UIs all of which would suck less than Google's pitiful attempt at UI. That would be interesting.

    Something that does bug me is I have a chromebook and I can't imagine the nightmare of my kids trying to do COVID at home school without full URLs? The pitiful thing about vertical silos is everyone needs multiple silos so all those URLs someShittyVerticalSiloSchoolApp.KidsSchoolDomain which works pretty well right now, would be compressed down to only "KidsSchoolDomain" as the name for multiple web apps. The conspiracy theorist in me suggests that could be fixed by purchasing infinite number of domain names and conveniently google DOES sell domain names so ...

    Another conspiracy theory post is this is a direct attack against self hosting web applications. You can run gitlab community edition at work for free and have a DNS name like gitlab.corporateDomain.com but if every web app in your company now has the same name "corporateDomain.com" regardless if its Outlook or Gitlab, and nobody can casually share URLs because all they see is the domain name... you can see someone claiming a corporate account at github is easier to access than a local air gapped firewalled gitlab system

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 15 2020, @02:10PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday June 15 2020, @02:10PM (#1008130) Journal

    Hmmm … maybe you could create a counter mechanism as follows:

    1. Install a local “web server” that actually accesses the real web site, but adds an URL display bar to the HTML itself.
    2. Take advantage of Chrome redirecting all DNS requests to its own nameserver by redirecting all traffic to the IP address of Google's nameserver to a locally installed nameserver (at the IP level) which simply gives back the local address, thus all the browser accesses go to that local “web server” described in the previous point, while all other programs can continue to use the internet normally (this of course assumes that you're not using Google's nameserver for your normal resolving).

    Or, of course, you could just use a different browser. ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 15 2020, @05:48PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 15 2020, @05:48PM (#1008225) Homepage Journal

      redirecting all traffic to the IP address of Google's nameserver to a locally installed nameserver

      And you think Chrome won't have sufficient cryptography to detect the substitution?

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 15 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 15 2020, @05:52PM (#1008227) Homepage Journal

    a library of "render this URL into a window"

    Any recommendations for such a library?

    -- hendrik

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @07:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @07:18PM (#1008270)

      IIRC, there was quite a big player working on this. I think this is the library: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml [github.com]