Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is awful

and then you have tons of security holes and bugs. Remember when browsers thought it was nice to hide loading from the user, and every site had to add "do not click submit twice" and such? what's next? one page apps relying on a share button and then having to write "do not share via the hidden URL"? ...google maps was like that for ages now that i think of that...

We should be coming up with ways to make information denser and more meaningful. not scarcer.

You know what I recently observed? A bunch of kindergarteners fastening their shoes to their feet with velcro straps.

Their shoes also had little blinky lights on them, so that cars don't run them over, when they chase a soccer ball into the street. Let make all the adults wear velcro shoes with blinky lights on them too.

As for typing URLs, I do that, too, but autocompletion takes over after one or two characters. E.g., 'ne' suffices to get me to the HN front page. Navigation for me is pretty much all search or autocomplete, followed by normal link following. Except for a couple of bookmarklets, I do not use bookmarks. Back in the nineties, I used bookmarks a lot.

Once in a while, I will manually change a URL already in the location bar or paste one in and modify it.

However, I do look at URLs a lot. They often provide valuable navigational clues. And I appreciate well-structured URLs, such as the readwrite.com ones you posted, and I scorn the opaque numerical messes that some content management systems generate. I agree with the article.

It's just like with Windows, applications use the location instead of the OS language to chose what language to default to.

L10n is broken. And no one seems to have any real interest in fixing it. The tools are there but they get ignored by pretty much everyone.

When I was still using a dumbphone I figured out that AT&T would let me sync my contacts to the web. I figured I'd try to do that to see if I could make them more manageable (by not having to edit them on a tiny screen with T9).

I searched all over the AT&T account page (att.com - where I view and pay my bills) and couldn't figure out how to access my contacts on the website. Eventually I googled enough to find out that I needed to manage contacts through att.net. That website redirected to a Yahoo page (att.yahoo.net) which didn't take the same credentials as att.com (that is, the att.com user:pass did not work), but if one was signed into the dot.com they could automatically be logged into the dot.net. It's extremely confusing.

Once logged in, I was presented with an interactive flash or heavy javascript page which, if not for the .csv import/export feature, I would find much more cumbersome than even just using the phone.

Before I managed to get logged in I clicked on numerous pages that redirected me to att.yahoo.net. Because it is labeled (and decorated) as a Yahoo webpage (and is, I assume, operated by Yahoo), I was quite confused over what credentials to use and if I was in fact at the proper website.

How do you define an average user anyhow? I think there's only more common use cases. Everyone has their special needs and uses on the internet.

Is it? What if "Starbucks" were your bank? What if you knew that apart from your bank there's non-bank entities mimicking your bank's looks in an effort to get your personal information? Would location still be irrelevant?

In your example, wouldn't the "BC" be the domain name and not "Starbucks?" I don't know if there's any way to know with certainty in all URLs whether the domain name or the path components are more important to a user.

In my opinion, this is up there with the removal of the URL protocol, the removal of the status bar, the removal of the menu bar, the removal of the ability to disable JavaScript easily, and the other similar changes we've seen from Chrome and/or Firefox over the past few years.

This useful functionality is removed under the guise of "increasing usability" or "improving security" or some equally vague justification. So-called "average users" don't even notice any improvement, while power users are forced to endure a dumbed-down, less effective browser experience.

What's more, the URL is not front and center in any web browser. The window title is taken from <title>, the path and query parts are displayed in lower contrast than the host part, and the address bar is not only hidden on iOS but also on Android when the user scrolls down the page.

This is just the same nerd-rage when Firefox introduced omnicomplete, only with less people vowing to switch to Opera.

1. "Google has a master plan and are gently testing the water to see how far they can push it"

or 2. "I think this is where trends will eventually carry us"

(2) is quite reasonable and (1) is a conspiracy theory that I personally think is a little absurd.

Because the url past the domain name is not for the user to be messing with most of the time. We the developers control everything to right of the first single slash. Maybe if it was hidden then it would force us to do a better job showing the users where they are in our sites with breadcrumbs and menus and at the same time keep them from trying to poke around in places where they shouldn't be. I think this is a perfect opportunity to open up our minds and build better UI inside the frame.