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posted by
Woods
on Thursday May 01 2014, @07:37PM
from the now-all-those-URLs-I-memorized-are-worthless dept.
from the now-all-those-URLs-I-memorized-are-worthless dept.
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.
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Chrome Experiments with URL-less Web
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday May 01 2014, @08:45PM
Whoever comes up with that crap is fairly unsophisticated to say the least.
Security through obscurity never works. More precisely, it works all the way up to the point that it doesn't, and then it's always catastrophic. So the idea is by not showing this to 99% of the people that the information is somehow protected from that 1% that can use a plethora of tools to reveal it.
Assuming they could get the idea off the ground, there would be hordes of average web developers that won't give the URL a seconds thought anymore as a possible attack vector.
Then you have the claim of greater usability. Only true if you have a very unsophisticated understanding of web technologies in the first place. Greater usability to the person is probably a minimalist approach showing no information that the lowest common denominator can't process and the use of strategic whitespace everywhere.
This is about dumbing down the experience for most people and removing the extraneous crap. I guarantee you that if you put this person in a room with 10 engineers he will have reinvented web-tv in 1 hour.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.