I opened Chrome on a friends phone (first time on Chrome mobile in years) and was shocked to see the url bar is no longer editable. It just gave me a weird context menu with a copy icon.
I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...
I guess they really want to funnel everyone through search...
Share, copy, and edit icons. While I'm not a big fan of it, it probably fits the frequency and relative friction of interactions on mobile better than the previous UI.
But just ask me how I feel about navigating other parts of Apple’s UI! Dunno who they’re user testing with but these changes make me a bit ornery sometimes.
If the latter, the default behavior gets in the way of the critical path.
I just hate it because it breaks well established UI conventions. The thing looks like a text field but doesn't act like a text field.
For me it is more of a "stop messing with UI" situation than trying to funnel everything through search. If they wanted to do that, they would have kept the dedicated search button. Early Android phones had that.
Nor, for that matter, can you click, ctrl-A (yes, Virginia, I have and use a Bluetooth keyboard). Instead it's click, then Copy Icon.
Utterly blinkered.
Oddly: Incognito mode is not (yet) crippled in this manner.
Don't get me started on pull-to-nuke-whatever-you'd-been-composing-or-losing-your-place-in-infernal-scroll
I'm assuming from context that your mean keyboard, but the idea sounds kind of cool so I have to ask: any chance this is a term for a a bluetooth device solely designed to facilitate copy-pasting between other devices?
For cross-device control, there's ... Synergy, I think:
There's an Android client (I've no experience with it): https://sourceforge.net/projects/synergyandroid/
On the Android, there's Termux which offers a clipboard interface -- termux-clipboard-get and termux-clipboard-set which I've aliased as "xp" and "xc" respectively. (I have similar aliases for Linux and MacOS's respective clipboard manipulators.)
You can paste (including to remote SSH sessions) with the ctrl-alt-v keystroke.
It's possibly to select and copy screen regions, but tediously, so that piping to / from xc / xp is far more convenient. (I sometimes use this for composing / editing HN comments, more frequently on other sites.)
In practice, I end up manually typing in long URLs on my laptop that people send me over SMS or whatever, and manually typing in long, high-entropy passwords on my phone when I would rather copy-paste them from my laptop's password database.
(Not that I'm running KDE. But the feature sounds great.)
edit: I should mention that I think this requires drivers on the computer end, so probably won't on iOS/Android
In my opinion this is still a gentle push to encourage users to just type in a search query instead.
Probably because URL copy or share (the two icons besides edit than the new UI provides) are more common interactions than URL editing, and are (without a keyboard and with a traditional text edit control for the URL bar) higher friction; this streamlines the common usecases at the cost of adding an extra tap for URL editing.
The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.
A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.
None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.
Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.
I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid.
Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid.
Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.
Editing is much easier. 2 clicks. Cursor starts at the end, swipe to scroll and tap to place cursor where you want it.It was very annoying before.
Most of the time I want to copy a URL. It's now 2 fast clicks. Previously you had to long click or something to try to select all the text, then some extra step I've forgotten. I often had to try several times.
Share is now much faster. Two fast clicks. Previously it was click top right ... long drop down menu, scroll down to Share. Click that.
If you can't go to expedia.com as easily as you can Google search Expedia, you'll probably do the later. And if you Google search Expedia, the first result is usually an ad for Expedia. Now Google makes money on you in a way they hadn't before. The more people expect Google to deal with all of the silly "web domain stuff" for them, the more money Google makes.
It's all about the incentives, and in the end there's only one incentive -- money.
I don't think anyone working at Google is being intentionally bad at all, but I do think their incentive structure ultimately results in prioritizing feeding people ads as much a possible. The A/B tests show that doing things a certain way results in more revenue, and that's what drives the decisions. There are likely no ethics meetings on the implications on society for each small change, but the collective result of many small harmless changes (aimed at increasing profit) is bad for society in the end. Not due to any conspiracy or "evil".
Typing a new address or copying the URL of the page I'm on covers ~95% of the use cases where I'm accessing the address bar on mobile and the change significantly reduces friction for both. It's exhausting to see every minute move Google/Amazon makes filtered through the HN cynicism lens.
Edit: Talking specifically about the chrome on Android omnibar change. The favicon desktop search change from TFA was awful.
Here is a story from April 2019: https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
with respect, I don't think there would be an ethics meeting scenario about whether the default interaction for tapping the URL bar is copy or edit that would find any ethical concerns, besides "nerds will be annoyed we moved their cheese."
Source: Google employee.
Many of kind of people that come to HN have personally worked on various forms of gamification and rule bending. It's as natural to SV culture as water to fish - indeed some of the biggest companies wouldn't be around without skirting rules and arguably morals.
The stench of MBAs and quarterly profit optimizing execs is all over the valley.
And then the ignorance/apathy of the layman adds an extra layer of plausibility to such accusations.
A good explanation for the increasingly normalized dark patterns ruining user experience on the web.
"Conspiratorial"? You bet. Have we not seen huge (and small) companies committed to screwing the public in as many ways as they can? It's not by accident, there's a widespread, condescending disrepect of users and just plain old conspiratorial maliciousness, intent on manipulating users and squeezing more profit.
Google's search results design (backtracked for now) is a clear symptom.
...and they only made it more of one by making you press an extra button. It's like they took the "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" mantra and turned it into "easy things should be easy, hard things should be harder."
Latest Chrome mobile running on Android 9.
Judging by the current state, it'll arrive with no add-on support, which I honestly hope doesn't happen.