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Comment by simonkafan | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a good example of "feature creep"? I dont see any reason why it makes a browser more useful when the URL is partially hidden.

It reminds me of a company which developed a product which was more or less done. So the SWE manager and the product manager made up new (pretty useless) features just to tell their bosses the devs are busy and the team must stay intact.

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To try and think of an upside for the user, it might help people detect phishing by making the domain name more prominent.

I've seen phishing sites like support.google.com.8n.cn where the right side (the most important) just disappears into the /path. Though this attack is even more brilliant on mobile devices that truncate the right hand side and leave with you with "support.google.com...".

Aside, I encourage fellow HNers to purposely visit seedy websites in a VM without an ad blocker. Especially if you haven't been exposed to crappy behavior since the popup/under days. Great way to see the state of hostile web practices, like unblockable popups and fake macOS notifications.

If they want the domain to be more prominent, they could also just make it... more prominent. Highlight it more and separate it.

This is what firefox does

sounds to me like "support.google.com.8n.cn" would still show up as "support.google.com..." on mobile, even when Chrome hides the URL, wouldn't it?

It makes their serving of AMP less transparent, which is a good thing for them. I guess.

I'm starting to wonder when the EU will raise the anti-trust flag. It seems obvious to me that Google tries to use it's start page market dominance to become the only webpage served on the Internet.

No, they already did that last year: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/04/16/amp-pages-will-now-...

This is the only economically rational explanation I can think of. Unless it ties into other user-abusive projects they have planned.

What about reducing phishing? Seems more obvious

Why assume good intentions when economic incentives (which we already know they have) already explain it?

What are the other browsers' intentions then, who are doing almost the same thing? What about the economic incentive of generally increasing trust in the web and ecommerce, which is highly relevant to their core business?

Also consider the sibling comment about AMP - looks like they already have special behaviour for that so this is barely relevant.

Why assume good intentions when profit and lock-in already explain it?

Try moving in the other direction. Have the browser always show a little bit of the HTML code or some Javascript variables. Will that make it better or worse? What's the correct amount of internal coding information to display to all users? I don't think URLs are the sweet spot of important information without useless mess.

They don't do this for the benefit of the user, but to benefit themselves. Its all about making the web into google lah lah land where they control everything.

I increasingly find myself using other search engines when looking up political contents. Google's seems to be censored, or wheigthed in a way that gives it heavy political bias. I wish they would just give good search results, like they used to. Would be a lot less hassle.

That's the filter-bubble you're seeing. It's showing you things it thinks you'll engage with, and hiding things it thinks you won't, and the algorithm is too stupid to do that properly but they use it anyway.

Just to play the devil advocate, removing the url bar gives slightly more room to display the website.

It isn’t removing the url bar. It’s hiding the full address of the website in the URL box. Your screen real estate is exactly the same.

You are right, I should have read TFA.

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