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Comment by 1stranger | Hacker News Reader

Why did everybody lose their minds over this? It seems Safari does this without much drama.

Huge reason was that Google also simultaneously pushed AMP while hiding that pages are hosted on Google servers. So if you visited page like:

  https://google.com/amp/something.com/directory/article

And in your address bar there will be just:

   something.com

This is literaly URL hijacking and it's fundamentslly breaks trust in your address bar.

Did google do that as part of this feature?

No, but I sure backlash against feature discussed here wouldn't be as big if Google's other hand wasn't pushing fake URLs for AMP pages.

You may refer SXG, but it seems that anyway SXG overrides URL to origin. So this is irrelevant.

The argument that the address bar is too complex and we need to dumb it down is irritating. If we want to regress to AOL keywords then great. I would prefer we stick with an address bar. Let those who can learn the reason it exists and how to use it, learn.

edit - btw I don't mean to infer parent poster argues this point, however it is often the reason 'designers' argue for these kinds of regressions.

I was wondering about exactly the same thing, had to use Safari for work recently and not seeing the URL was extremely confusing.

In preferences it’s simply a check box to have it show full URLs in safari all the time.

Yes, as someone who only occasionally uses a Mac, I always think Safari is broken until I remember Apple tries to hide everything from you for your own good.

This might be news to you, but many apps on Mac actually have preferences that allow you to change their behavior. That's one of them.

If you can't do anything, you also can't do anything bad!

I like to know which page I'm on

The current one

The next change Google will try is replacing the URL with just "The current one".

That’s basically what this experiment was. Show the origin only. The current page is obvious from the page itself.

Pure speculation, but maybe because most of the commentary on this was coming from developers.

I don't have an iPhone anymore but used to, and it was no problem that I only saw the domain, because on my phone I rarely cared about the specific address. When I'm working it's a bitch because quickly knowing the full address is useful all the time, and even at home much the same because I'm used to interacting heavily with my address bar.

I'd imagine that most people, even on their laptops, are closer to the former situation, so it's not hard for it to have relatively widespread support.

On a phone there simply isn't space to display much more than the domain name. Picking some subset of the URL to display is unavoidable, and the domain name usually going to be a better subset than the obvious other options of the start or the end of the URL. As such I see nothing wrong with it there. On desktops you do typically have enough space to show the full URL, so I dislike it showing only the domain name.

As a user it's often also helpful to understand the context of what you're reading (as long as the site has a descriptive URL structure) - is this a blog post, featured article, sponsored article, when was it written.... a good URL conveys a lot of useful information and hiding this seems highly counterproductive.

I am also very much against hiding "www.", but that's mostly from a developer/devops perspective. https/http can be hidden behind an icon, that's fine since it's a binary option, but that's as far as I'd go in accepting stripping information from URL's.

That's the kind of usage that only happens because it's available. No matter what internal information is presented to people, some will find a way of using that. But part of designing software is to curate what information to show the user, not dump an arbitrary pile of cryptic internal details on them.

URLs are mostly not fit for human consumption and don't even reliably show you what page you're on. They're a stinky skidmark on the otherwise human-accessible web.

I hope we can eventually have two clearly distinct parts to URLS - a simple domain name without www. or https:// and clearly separate, a human-readable name for the page without internal implementation details like filename extensions and symbols. Some sites are pretty close to this, New York Times is easily understandable but still filled with slashes and a redundant extension. Eg: "nytimes.com/2021/06/10/us/politics/justice-department-leaks-trump-administration.html". Hacker News is too but has a human-unfriendly "item?id=" before the (good, imo) incrementing decimal integer, not hex, not random, not padded ID number.

I'm 100% with you, but I know plenty of fairly computer-literate people who wouldn't know how to interpret a URL, and wouldn't know what to do with that information if they did.

I don't know how those two stances, or the positions between them, break down across the population, but at minimum it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it leans towards not understanding or caring.

Who is going to advocate for users if not developers? It’s like giving out that civil rights lawyers are lawyers so why is their work relevant to ordinary citizens

How is this not advocating for users? They tested the idea based on a metric they hoped would improve among users, found it didn't work, and so left it as is.

That the comments about it mostly come from developers or similarly tech-literate people is neither here nor there, comments are inherently personal. When I post on a forum about a feature, I'm generally presenting only my own opinion. When I'm implementing a feature, I'm generally basing it on the opinions of users, as best I can gather them.

Yeah and they came to the same conclusion as “the cranky developers” had been moaning about all along. Fancy that.

/me looks up, see a full URL in Safari's address bar, looks down, reads comment, looks up...

I might have set that as a preference, I can't remember.

I had to turn it off in Safari, not a good ux.

Safari doesn't have enough marketshare for people to get very upset about it, and more importantly you can turn it off, which people did not trust Google to do.

I imagine most people here used Chrome before people started switching to Firefox once Google's large presence became more of a concern.

Safari is what safari does

Safari was always garbage; Chrome used to fight for the users and now it's fighting for Master Control.

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