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Chrome Experiments with URL-less Web

posted by Woods on Thursday May 01 2014, @07:37PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by acharax on Friday May 02 2014, @04:51AM

    by acharax (4264) on Friday May 02 2014, @04:51AM (#38746)

    Whatever "convincing" argument can be brought in favor of this, and I'm sure something could be concocted to that end, this is but another step toward the mean UI "experts" have decided to regress interface design to. "Let's remove all potential points of failure, surely that'll stop simple minded people from hurting their poor brains." Perhaps, if the reasoning behind these actions was honest I'd be able to swallow my bile and accept it, but it's yet more change for the sake of change, change for the sake of being different, a proxy by which marketing hopes to appeal to the ever increasing web hipster crowd.

    To some extent this is a self fulfilling prophecy. Breed a userbase that becomes more and more overwhelmed by anything that remotely resembles complexity because they're never posed by anything that could be taken as such, and you'll soon have ample future excuses to cull features at your heart's desire whenever you're no longer in the mood to support them. I might be biased and bitter about this, but I also think this trend endangers quality engineering because of the dishonest reasons it grants developers to curtail features that they feel are hard to maintain.

  • (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 ;-)

  • (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.