In other words, an obfuscation of functionality that clearly shows their attempts at behavioural conditioning.
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/
Source: Google employee.
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."
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."