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Comment by roder | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the sentiment on the thread that removing http:// is a UX bug. Copy & Paste in this case is paramount over UI simplification. Keep it simple... do not make it a configurable option and do not remove http://.

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I'm using the latest dev release that has this feature implemented. Let me tell you how it actually works. The location bar looks like this:

    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263512

When I select it and press Ctrl-C it copies this to the clipboard:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263512

Nothing is broken.

Useful to know, but I have to agree with portman. What about switching to an https: URL? Loads of sites default to http when they should be secure.

Perhaps it would be better to add a white 'Not identified' badge in the place where the green Certificate Name (or red broken certificate name) goes?

Clicking it would reveal a message that the site is not identified, and information being sent to it is viewable to third parties.

Nobody in my immediate family know what https:// means. They especially have no idea what its absence means.

... They especially have no idea what its absence means.

Oh, I wholly agree, this makes sense for the average user. It's just wasted space to most people. They've already dimmed everything but the domain name (a brilliant idea in every single way), making the prefix' "cognitive impact" rather minimal already. To that end, I don't personally see that removing it is necessary, nor helpful. So at best it maintains the status-quo, and arguably lowers it slightly.

But, since these decisions are largely made for the majorities, it does make sense that they're going that route; I'm not really annoyed, I'm just mildly disagreeing with the decision.

As to the white non-secure flag, I'd tint it slightly yellow so it raises an eyebrow for people interested in their own privacy; white is too ignorable, and much harder to see at a glance. On the whole, it's an interesting idea, as it'd effectively turn the whole http/https battle into a slight-but-real push to move to https entirely.

> As to the white non-secure flag, I'd tint it slightly yellow so it raises an eyebrow at people interested in their own privacy; white is too ignorable, and much harder to see at a glance. On the whole, it's an interesting idea, as it'd effectively turn the whole http/https battle into a slight-but-real push to move to https entirely.

Exactly what I'm thinking. Just raise it as info, then change it to a warning progressively over time, with some advance warning to web developers.

Try to copy "http://news.ycombinator.com to the clipboard.

On Mobile Safari, the URL is displayed without the http:// until you tab on it and it will include the http:// as the URL box expands.

This is clearly how hiding http:// should be done (if at all). Playing tricks with the clipboard is going to be confusing and frustrating to use. It is also suggested in other comments here; I hope the Chrome devs pick this up.

Copy and pasting using the X clipboard does not result in the addition of http://

Works for me.

Are you sure you weren't using the X primary selection (select, middle-click) instead of the X clipboard selection (usual ctrl-c/copy, ctrl-v/paste)?

There's another use case, maybe it's just me, but at least once a week I need to insert a single "s" into the URL to go from the non-SSL to the SSL version of a page.

My proposed solution: go ahead and hide the http://, but when you click onto the address bar (and therefore want to edit the URL), show the http:// at that time.

This solves copy-paste issues, changing protocol issues, and probably others.

But I'm not sure where to make that suggestion on the Chromium issue tracker.

My proposed solution: If it ain't broke...

Even better, but there seems to be tons of enthusiasm on the Chromium team for removing http. I'm just hoping they minimize the collateral damage.

Reminds me of another dominant tech company with a history of thinking it knows better than its users and making awful UI decisions.

Canonical?

controversial != awful

Sometimes doing things like that work, re: floppy drives and the iMac.

I'm sure the same thing was said about inner-tube tires. I mean, why re-invent the wheel?

Because have you ever ridden a bicycle with a flat tire? I hardly think the two use cases compare.

Anyway Comment #24 makes a lot of sense http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40865#c24 I see the enhancement for the end users who have NFI what http is but leaving it there provides more advantages as a whole than removing it.

That's a saying that works only when things fail. But if you applied it to everything all the time, then no progress will be made.

If I remember correctly, isn't this how the iPad does it? I don't have one so I can't check.

On one now and you're exactly right. Seems like the best of both worlds.

incidentally, the iPhone does it that way as well.

But you can still do this.

Just:

1) [F6] = Goes to the address bar and highlights the URL

2) [CTRL]+[C] = Copies the URL in it's entirety

3) [CTRL]+[V] = Pastes it back in the address bar, now with http://

4) [Home] = Go to the start of the line

5) [>][>][>][>] = Move beyond "http"

6) [s] = Insert the "s"

7) [Return] = Navigate

See! Google have already thought of this and this wonderful feature is available already.

PS: Down-voters are trigger happy, to them: This is a joke!

Considering how often adding an s to http is done (for example, I've only done this once, in gmail, before I saw the 'always use https' setting), I think that this is OK.

Still don't think it should be removed, though, just sayin' :)

If you want to discuss the http issue the place is chromium-discuss@chromium.org

Personally I don't see what purpose there could possibly be in removing it. The worst part is that it causes ambiguity about what will be copied (if the user was confused before about http they will be doubly confused when it magically appears after copying it).

"Keep it simple..."

I think the idea is to keep it simple for most users, not the techies.

I don't think many non-techies have any clue why the http is there, and they (rightly) don't care.

As for "adding an 's' for the secure site", once again, how many non-techies do you know actually do this? I'm not saying that's a good thing, but most casual computer users don't know about that. Hopefully they know about the lock icon on most browsers, but I actually kinda doubt that too.

The prefix is only removed from the "steady-state" display. It will still be there if you copy the URI from the address bar.

EDIT: Verified that copying works in the current nightly build, although there are some quirks pasting into rich text controls in some apps (like Pidgin).

I presume that you mean "copying" via Ctrl+C and not the X11 way of simply highlighting the text. The latter is known to be broken in Chrome.

I filed a bug for it that which was wontfixed: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=27972

Yep, I can confirm that pasting http: URIs from the X11 "primary selection" is broken in the current Chromium nightly.

I'm glad that got wontfixed. It's not the convention at all in Windows or OS X. I can't stand applications that unexpectedly mess with my clipboard. Lotus Notes does this all the time and it drives me nuts. I make an attachment, and bam, my copied text is gone.

But fixing this wouldn't affect Windows or OS X, and middle-click pasting is the convention in Linux. I hate when I use Windows and inevitably realize yet again I can't do it. (Also, highlighted text sends to a different clipboard than ctrl+c.)

I don't think anybody's ever got this quite right. It's especially frustrating working with Firefox and GNOME terminal. Firefox copies into both clipboards, GNOME terminal replaces the selection clipboard when I Visually select something in vim, then when I paste from what should've been in the selection clipboard, I get what I just deleted in vim. It seems the behavior wrt selection vs copy clipboard is inconsistent from desktop to desktop and version to version.

Yeah, Chrome is actually reasonably good about making copied URLs be valid URLs, backing out any display that was done to them in the URL-bar. Better than Firefox on this: for example, in the URL bar, both Chrome and Firefox display '%7c' as '|', which makes the URL invalid. But when you copy it out of the URL bar, Chrome turns it back into %7c, whereas FF doesn't.

The main odd UX issue is that you usually expect copying text to give you that same text in the clipboard, whereas in Chrome you get something magically changed.

Chrome address bar is very smart. It will decode the %xx%xx%xx escape to their recognizable original characters, e.g.

http://i42.tinypic.com/241kxhc.png

But when you copy the whole URL, it will be copied as the %xx%xx escape as every URL do

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en_US&query=%E6%B5%8B%E8...

Note if you only copy partial of the URL, not the whole URL, you will still get decoded text

All of the browsers I have installed, besides Opera, do this.

Safari FireFox Camino Chrome

It can't be hard to make copy and past work fine without http://. Fact is that it's mostly irrelevant for the majority of users.

How about removing it, but modifying the functionality of the copy action, so it appends the clipboard with http:// if the user has selected/copied the entire URL?

Personally, I have no qualms with http://, I just think this suits the best of both worlds: the future and the past.

What about https:// ?

Obviously the browser would know the true url, so it'd be able to just copy that.

Also, it seems the functionality I mentioned is already in Chrome.

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