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dylan604

>I'm not sure whether it's good or bad,

It's bad, very very bad

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If it’s Google doing something to try to change the internet, it approaches certainty that it’s bad, whatever “it” is.

I believe the word you're looking for is 'evil'.

I tend to agree, but at the same time I find anecdotes like this comment elsewhere in this thread[1] compelling. It may be we're just wrong and there really is a better way to do it, I've certainly been wrong about plenty of other things. Dunno.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28864722

My counter to that is that if you think you are submitting a URL to go to a website but instead that data is sent to 3rd party which allows them to continue their tracking of everything you do, then this is bad.

Be upfront and clear with your users. If you are sending data to a 3rd party in a way that is not 100% obvious, then it's bad UI leaning towards dark patterns. If you are a UI dev and it never occurred to you a user would do something like this, then that's typical. If after you learn that users are doing something you as the dev finds not normal, then maybe the UI needs to be tweaked. If you design the UI to confuse/trick people, then you are just an asshole.

I think you will find you are in a tiny minority. Most people don't care about that, and you have a long uphill battle to convince them they should, especially if they find this new experience more useful. Legislation may be a way to solve that problem, but we've long left discussing the URL bar at that point.

Edit: Also I genuinely don't think collecting end-user data is the primary goal of the Chrome team with this change, although I agree it's a likely side-effect. I think they are trying to create a better end-user experience, even if you and I don't feel that it is better for us (nerds) in particular :)

So how is typing into the text field a full URL like 'example.com' and getting a search result better for the user than going to the damn url that was entered?

If I was actually wanting to search for information about the URL provided, then the result is expected. However, if I just want to go to the damn url, it is not useful at all. Now, in this unified input that you seem complacent with, how do I avoid the step of search results when I just want to view a specific website?

I've said several times I agree with your discomfort with the idea, so please chill out a bit :)

Also, I didn't say google wants to kill the URL bar. I said google wants to kill the URL. So you wouldn't type in "example.com", you would do something else to get to whatever content you wanted from what used to be called "example.com".

I don't know what the replacement for URLs will be, and it seems neither does Google (yet), but I'm at least open to the idea that there may be a better idea.

Some further reading:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/google-wants-to-get-...

https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

> at the same time I find anecdotes like this comment elsewhere in this thread[1] compelling

I don't. As I replied to that post directly, the URL bar is not like the choke lever on a car, but more like the steering wheel or navigation input. It's the UI element that is used to communicate user's goals to the machine - not some incidental control of a subsystem that gets automated away.

Google is suggesting replacing the URL entirely. URLs have real problems, which are genuinely really hard to solve. They're also designed for a subset of web content, and a lot of modern web content does not fit into the URL scheme very well. I don't know if Google's replacement will be better, but I am at least willing to hear them out once they have a proposal.

I'd be happy to hear them out too. Much less happy with them just slowly, piece by piece, making their vision happen without "public consultation", just by the virtue of being the dominant browser vendor.

I don't think they're trying to "make their vision happen," I think they're trying to solve real issues people have with URLs. Some of their solutions don't work, as stated in the article I linked original, but I don't think they're doing anything nefarious. They're trying to serve their users, the vast majority of whom have no idea what a URL is.

> I don't think they're trying to "make their vision happen," I think they're trying to solve real issues people have with URLs.

I think you're sadly misguided and, frankly, scaringly naïve.

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