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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.

• I like Safari's implementation better I like Safari's implementation better (Score: 2) by tbuddy on Thursday May 01 2014, @08:35PM

  by tbuddy (932) on Thursday May 01 2014, @08:35PM (#38637)

  I don't really find it to be a huge deal as whenever I want to copy a URL I hit the standard CMD+L to grab the URL. This still works that way, though I like the way Safari puts the domain in black and the remainder of the URL in gray. The way Chrome Canary has it as a badge isn't ideal to me and has far too much space essentially wasted on the search bar. A simple change to flags [chrome] will allow you to change it, or any of the other experiments. Complaining about alpha clients experiments is kind of a luddite reaction to me. The whole point is to have options for people to play around and test the waters and totally not indicative of what the future holds. They specifically put out new features for people to test the waters. Most of the features in Canary that do make it over to Chrome can be turned off if one chooses, so it isn't as though you are forced to use new behaviors if you don't want to. That's a sharp contrast from some of the things Apple or Opera does, which force you to downgrade or wait on a new build.

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• Re:I like Safari's implementation better (Score: 1) by LegendaryTeeth on Friday May 02 2014, @02:33AM

  by LegendaryTeeth (2431) on Friday May 02 2014, @02:33AM (#38724)

  Why put things out to "test the waters" if people aren't allowed to complain about it?

  Seems quite reasonable to look at something like this and talk about how it is or isn't a stupid idea. In fact it seems like the whole point.

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