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Glad to know my all time favorite web site is still around and kickin it all these years later!

http://www.something.com/

creating a link this crashes and hovering the mouse over it crashes!
It seems it's the %%30%30 which causes that (this should be unescaped as "%300").

Even better example (not being distracted by one link that happens to be a redirect to itself): http://www.something.com/

Have fun getting from *there* to anywhere else...

And when your backup hasn't run yet what than? I've worked on 100+ TB of live data several PB of capacity systems. Sometimes users are dumping 10Gbps data to disk for days at a time. Than someone deletes something and woops the tape hasn't archived it yet. Admittedly a "recycle bin" probably wouldn't handle TBs of data but still scale the problem done and it is still a real issue. Downloaded a pdf and accidentally deleted it rather than the paper you just read. Oh crap and can't remember where it came from because you've clicked on 50 links between than and very useful links like http://something.com/alkshftfhY^asdlfkhalnlknlkrehwo aren't very helpful in finding out what the docs were. Seems trivial but anything that a user can see on a nearly daily basis isn't trivial it is a every day net positive feature to have.

I don't know about the wisdom fo removing the URL bar outright, but there are definitely interface and usability issues with it, and it can be something better and more useful than just something that shows the current page's URL (and it's sometimes misleading at that too). After all, you don't need an editable text box just to show the URL of the page you're visiting.

From an interface standpoint, the URL bar looks as if it were something that applies to all of the tabs. What they could do to clean up the interface is switch the tab and the url bar around, so that each tab would appear to have its own url bar. I have the same objections to the navigation/reload/stop/home buttons.

In terms of functionality, the URL bar only shows URLs, which is a waste of space when there are other places (like a status bar) that would fit that purpose. In fact, a great anti-phishing device would be to display in the status bar the URL of the part of the page the cursor is hovering over. You can't really do this on the URL bar because that's supposed to be static until you type something in or click on a link, but the status bar changes depending on what you hover over.

But I digress. I'd like to see more functionality integrated into the URL bar. They should make it more closely resemble a CLI, where if somebody types in "google abc" or something of that sort, it would search for "abc" using Google. "help" would launch help (like F1). "get http://something.com/foobar.zip" would download foobar.zip from something.com. "bookmark" would bookmark the page. And in the way Excel behaves when typing in functions, there could be a toggle-able auto-complete command feature.

People like big buttons and fancy menus, and those should not be removed outright (they should be hide-able). But I think a lot of people would enjoy the ability to do everything with a few strokes of the keyboard.

http://something.com/

Something.com always delivered something.

I like this one better. (at least it contains something)

something.com has even fewer!

This is potentially a very small website. I mean, about 98% of all its entries can probably be summed up by one word, so why not just put that word up and leave it there, sort of like Something.com?

Oh, almost forgot to mention the word that they could use to replace all those entries.

CRIMETHINK.

You raise a good point, and one which hadn't really occurred to me before.

That said, the internet is increasingly penetrating every aspect of our lives, and I can't see it stopping or reversing any time soon. In 1994 hardly anyone (comparatively) was on-line, but you still heard people worrying we'd be creating a "digital class" and an "offline class". These days even my grandmother is online, and with internet cafes and ever-cheaper hardware (and F/OSS) it's only getting easier and cheaper to get access.

The rich and educated will always form the early adopters of any expensive and complicated technology (in fact, that assertion is practically a tautology), but I find it hard to believe it won't trickle-down into all aspects of our culture in the near future. Even those who aren't on-line at home generally know what http://www.something.com/ means, or that wibble@blarg.com is something to do with your e-mail address.

Indeed, if anything I'd say since 1994 I've seen an acceleration of people getting net access, at least in the west. And there are increasing numbers of "sub-$100 PC" and "PCs to the third-world" projects, even they (in time) should catch up.

To be sure, there will always be people who any technology leaves behind, but then there are people who still can't read and write, and we've had that technology for thousands of years. I don't think we need to worry too much unless the barrier to entry for net access becomes prohibitive for large groups of the population, and since this requires a reversal of the obsolescence process and the eradication of cyber-cafes, I think we're safe for the moment.

That said, thank you for highlighting the fact that at the moment the "online world" is hardly in the enormous majority - far too many people seem to blithely assume everyone who's worth bothering about is already online, and massively over-estimate how important they are to the overwhelming majority of humanity.

http://www.something.com

This article is beginning to look like something I'd see on memepool.

Just do click here for hot hot grrls!