I buy it honestly.
>I buy it honestly.
phishing should look nice to the victim?
I don't know if there's any research on users to confirm that this works. It would be good to do such research before making such a change, if that's the motivation for the change. But it seems plausible to me.
What become irrelevant is the AddressBar itself for the user.
User simply doesn't look at it at all because usually it is not changing with each click. So it appears irrelevant and disconnected from the actions user takes.
It looks for non-technical person as "some name of the web site which doesn't always shows the right name, but it's ok because hey nothing works perfectly on computer anyway ... so it doesn't matter". This is how it looks to the average person. They do not even understand why it's there. "Just takes the space ... Why it's there? Site shows name anyway on the page ... " They just have no idea what is going on thanks to this wonderful idea of removing the real address bar ... Not that they were too much aware before but at least you could explain them ... not anymore.
According to my experience non-technical people just lost the concept of url completely and do not even know where it is. Even when one asks them about it specifically. These are the 'real' results of this idiotic idea which I observe in practice and I unfortunately I observe it too frequently to ignore it. But hey .. downvoters of my previous sarcastic post seems to be very happy to ignore the reality. They would rather stick to their wise decision and downvote reality if they do not like it. Good luck with that.
There are various mindsets that lead to want to do that - one designer I know calls it a debugging tool that should never have been released in the first place.
For others, it is clearly about controlling the user with various justifications.
(I consider it a canary. Its removal will be a signal that the HugeCos are comfortable relegating the non-corporate web to the fringe, Usenet-style. It will be there, and you can get to it if you go way out of your way, but what it there will mostly be automated spam and weirdness, tons of examples of specific use cases, and a few folks who have been arguing with each other since 1992.)
I've heard similar comments but I don't understand how people would be expected to navigate around the internet? Is the idea that Google's search input should replace it? So if I want to go to sec.gov I should search SEC and click the link (hopefully) provided at the top of the results rather than just go there directly? It just doesn't make sense to me.
It is often possible (if hard) to configure browsers to do traditional URL resolving, but I wouldn’t bet on it always being possible. Google certainly has every reason to disallow reconfiguring their own browser to not send data to Google.
Safari has been doing this for a while now, yet no one is up in arms about it.
Suggesting Google might do anything without ad-related motives is probably too generous, but I've always thought that this was an optimisation in the sense that it's built on optimism: when everything's working well, most of what's in the URL bar is irrelevant. So the bar is built towards working well in the best case, at the expense of becoming much less useful in the worse (and probably more common) case.
Hiding/obscuring details from the URL bar seems like much less of a big deal if the goal is to rehost someone else's content. The value statement of the URL goes down a lot in that case, and the push to drive users away from it starts to make sense.
Either which way, I still hate it - The only non-work related ticket I've put in for chromium was a request for an option to disable this behavior entirely.
It's bad form from folks who should know better.
Safari on both mobile and desktop started doing this years before AMP was a thing.