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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I see hiding the URL as a big step backwards.

We're on the edge of a "Web 3.0" revolution where people use URIs as global unique identifiers for concepts. It makes sense that Google hides URIs because they're threatened by the semantic web (by increasing the amount of meaning/byte, the kind of 'big data' analysis that Google does will be possible for smaller startups and eventually desktop users.) Firefox doesn't have a reason to hold back the future though...

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What makes you think people understand URI bars? Often times they become fairly unintelligible as the number of resources go up. Even if we slugify titles into the URI, there are almost always other path hierarchies and parameters to handle paging, sorting states, or otherwise. The user has already clicked through, he can easily see the title in the tab; the rest of the URI is probably meaningless or not worth understanding for the 99%. 99% of the time, it is probably even a waste for the other 1%; it's not that URIs are going away.

I'm not even sure what you mean by a "Web 3.0" revolution. The following is the future?

* Youtube link off my Youtube homepage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg&feature=g-all...

* Twitter status link: https://twitter.com/#!/snookca/status/164424086309715968 -- though I'd wager a majority of users simply hit retweet and never see the resource URI

* Facebook photo off my wall: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=343550758997176&...

I wouldn't agree that you can easily see a title in a tab! I'd rather a meta key that would bring up the info about the page easily - which listed the URI etc. But the title should remain at the forefront.

I think we've pretty much ruined URLs in terms of usability. Sometimes they are logically organized URI's which point to a specific resource but a lot of the time they are a jumble of characters for session state, tracking info, script names, and all kinds of other garbage the user can't make heads or tails of.

We're on the edge of a "Web 3.0" revolution where people use URIs as global unique identifiers for concepts.

Machines and browsers do that. People don't treat URIs as anything. They could not care less, actually.

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