Sorry, what? Could you expand on this? What do you mean by doing away with URLs?
"I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now," says Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome. "But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck."
https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
She's says it's important that they do something! GTFOH! Hands of our Internet!
The problem here is that they view Chrome as their platform. They have too much market share ala IE6. Instead of following and helping to shape standards, they are considering highjacking the project. Argh!!!!!
Hidding the url scheme was the first step down this path of utter stupidity and I vividly remember the hostility and hubris of the Chrome team at the time.
We still have Firefox, but many times they just blindly follow suit.
But how are we to expect users to know any better until general technology literacy improves?
Many people can't tell you the difference between a modem, router, OS, browser, or website.
I remember years ago sitting down with my elderly grandmother trying to show her how to use a desktop...
We are too close to our work so everything is familiar and easy.
Even the concept of moving the mouse on a table to represent moving the mouse cursor on the screen is something we take for granted.
Tell someone who's never used a mouse before to double click something to open it. You have to start way back earlier at the concept of which physical button on the mouse to use.
This turned more into a general rant about how we overestimate regular users but I'ts been on my mind for awhile.
They don't care, nor should they. How many people know how many spark plugs are in their car?
You're correct. We, the more tech-literate, take too much for granted; and most experiences and learning curves are too far over the head of the "average" user.
It's not them. It's us.
It's more like looking in the mirror before changing lanes. It's something you need to check in order to stay safe.
Mirrors, like URLs, are just an implementation detail. But since currently driving works with mirrors, you have to learn how to use them.
Where is the cause and effect for a URL or SSL cert? There is no learning experience.
Furthermore as some have claimed, and I've personally witnessed, for some URLS's literally dont exist. Just type whatever site you want into the google box and hope you get lucky.
We have enough historical context to realize that things like parsing URLs by eye is unsafe for the general population, and always will be. The solution is to engineer that need out of existence.
You might want to consider that manufacturers have added blind spot detectors to cars as people are bad at changing lanes safely, even with all the training in the world.
One could say the interface was dumbed down to the minimum.
So in this case:
Not display www. in the address bar is actually a whole lot like not display www. in the address bar.
They absolutely should care. They should be aware that when they store things in "the cloud" they are not stored on their device and are visible to third parties. They should understand what encryption is and how to use it. "I don't know what I'm doing, and I didn't get the result I wanted, but it's not my fault it's the machine" is not an acceptable statement, whether we're talking about cars or computers.
"How do you not know that?"
Why would I need to know this? Why do I need to know what a cylinder is to drive? Is this even a logical question with electric cars now?
You are arguing what should be vs. what is.
* Well, I don't currently drive but I couldn't tell you with 100% accuracy the number of cylinders my last car had.
But you do know how many pedals there are in the car and probably, how many switches there are for the lights, and that the wiper has different steps of speed etc. You even manage to control these few elements, because they are the user facing elements your dealing with, the interface. There's no need to unify the pedals into a single one and to have the car to decide, whether it means accelerate, break, or clutch. Doing so would alienate you from the very task of driving, from what it means and what risks are involved. Taking these few controls away from you in favor of an ambiguous I-know-it-all-so-you-should't-care interface of ultimate convenience would probably not increase the security of operations.
On the other hand, we may expect you, as a driver, to know that there is a engine, that this is why the car moves, that it needs gas/petrol in order to run, that deacceleration is proportional to speed, etc.
Why is it so different with anything involving a computer? Is it, because we're telling them so?
I bring up in a previous reply that mirrors, and now lights, pedals, and other controls, that these are directly user-facing and must be interacted with in order to get anything done. Even knowing there is an engine that might need engine-y things like water and oil.
But where is the requirement a user knows about URLS in order to use the web?
Way back when we had AOL keywords. Now we have Google and apps and other tools that make URLS unnecessary.
My grandmother that I I mentioned before. She browses solely through bookmarks and via Google results. That a URL exists is not only an implementation detail but completely unneeded and unused in her case.
Then something like an SSL cert? Where it will work just fine without? I don't even want to imagine trying to explain that to my grandmother before sending her off to her decades old AOL mail inbox.
Only recently with Chrome displaying "Not Secure" have I even noticed any concern or interest amongst non-technical friends and aquaintances.
Also, I consider some of this very US centric. In many parts of the world, AOL wasn't a big thing. In many languages, people are used to the fact that important parts of a sentence come at the very end, e.g., the verb, at least in some tenses. Moreover, most important identifiers go from the minor, less important part to the bigger, most significant ones. Why can't we tell users that domains work just like their post address? (As in "street-city-country". And there are even funny ones, like "street-city-state-country" and even funnier ones, like "c/o", meaning it's not the usual addressee. Why are people able to deal with this?) If you're living in a western country, even your own name works probably like this. Why this, oh, it's magic, don't care?
I'd say, it is mostly, because we encourage them not to care. Because we say, "Yes, that's really difficult", where we ought to say, "No, it's really simple and you ought to know." The user is still the person in charge. Pampering and flattering the person in charge into incompetence isn't apt to end well.
I'd say, there's a chance to convey simple things, like, the cloud is not on your local machine, or how a URL is principally constructed. Or that a file is saved only, when you safe a file.
Edit: Returning to the obligatory-car-simile, when I did my driver's test, I had to know the intrinsics of an engine, of the braking mechanism, of the steering. I was tested for knowledge of ad-hoc technical repair. It was assumed reasonable for a driver to grasp, to memorize the details, to minutely describe them, and it was even mandatory to do so in order to obtain a license. However, it was less important to drive a car then (you could do well without this in most occupations) than it is to operate a computer nowadays.
Edit 2: And, to level up a bit, how comes that academics are able to correctly cite a book and page, but are unable to parse a URL – and are even flattered for the latter?
So, it's entirely unfair to suppose that since people got used to having tap water and so we are surprised if a person can't operate a tap, therefore they should be used to the entire complexity of computation by now.
You definitely _should not_ count machines that aren't actually computers ("digital accounting machines with storage") since those aren't Church-Turing, they're just another trivial machine like a calculator. Instead, compare the other working example we have of full-blown Church-Turing: Humans. Why aren't people somehow used to everything about people yet? People have been around a long time too. Why isn't everyone prepared for every idiosyncratic or even nonsensical behaviour from other people, they've surely had long enough right?
Anti-intellectualism runs deep in our society.
We're talking about users not understanding the technology they use daily.
jwalton, in trying to give an example with spark plugs, allowed a more knowledgeable user or practitioner, mirimir, to give a more technically-correct description.
It seems to echo the main problem we are discussing in which users of a technology are not the same as those who design or know the nitty-gritty details of that technology.
Assumptions learned from day to day use in that technology (all cylinders have one plug, the google box is the only box I need) can so easily be proven incorrect when speaking to an actual expert in that field.
But it's arguably not such a great example, because details of engine design are generally trivial for drivers. Maybe a better example is the low oil pressure indicator. Maybe most people don't know what that actually means, but not having one can lead to severe engine damage. Years ago, I had a car with an oil radiator, and the oil line failed. So I knew to stop immediately.
What's easier to tell apart for nontechnical users? URL bar from Google search field or ads from Google results?