“I don't know why this enrages folks so much.” Googler re Chrome anti-feature

Recently someone at Google published a proposed change to Chrome that would make it easy for sites to restrict how people can browse the web, and then closed discussion, saying they'd bring it back at the end of the weekend and not bringing it back. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

Google went down this accusatory path before, when they sought to remove the URL from the address bar. This thread was started by another developer working at Google (This developer now works at Shopify).

Edit: It gets a bit wilder down the thread:

"We shouldn't forget how weird URLs are. Just look at them. Weird delimiters. The order of specificity changes half way through…

The browser doesn't show the user raw HTML and expect them to figure it out themselves. I don't think we should do that with URLs either."

This part "The order of specificity changes half way through". It doesn't so much because of chunking. When I think of news.ycombinator.com my mind recognizes that right away. It doesn't rehash the order each time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

As for "weird delimiters" forward slashes are the only delimiters in play much of the time. Those make good sense for representing a hierarchy to me. As for https:// & http:// those are hidden for me and I have no problem with that. And it's sufficient on desktop, but on mobile they make it too much of a pain to view the whole URL, or even the whole domain name. Wrapping the text would work.

Web people are actually insane. Making security depend on etld+1 is just complete madness.

The proposal in the video is actually not bad (domain at the start followed by actual URL) if they can put back tge http(s):// prefix in the URL part.

F$%^& Google.