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Chrome May Drop the URL Bar
An anonymous reader writes "There isn't much Google can still eliminate from the browser's interface. Yet Google appears to be considering a drastic step to free up space in the UI: It may simply kill the URL bar. Instead of showing the URL bar all the time, it may be hidden within tabs. There are some other features coming as well. For example, Google will allow users to be logged into different Google accounts at the same time, as long as you use those accounts in different windows."
...but that's going a little overboard. The one thing that you really shouldn't ever try to shuffle away on a browser is the URL bar.
I don't think that's something I could ever get used to.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I understand the drive to minimize the UI in popular applications, but there's a point where it is taken too far. When widgets with intuitive functions start to have extra, magic functionality added on in order to get rid of other widgets, that raises a yellow flag with me. A tab, I get. A text box, I get. A combo tab and text box, hmm, I could get used to it, I guess. But taken too far, I can see UI's being without any chrome at all, and interacting with it becomes a mysterious combination of gestures, control keys, and hovering over the right places. I'm not a fan of that.
I used to think it was odd, seeing my supervisor do that at work, when I suggested a site to him which might not necessarily be work related. Some great time later, I realized why he did it that way-- If you type the URL into Google, it doesn't show up in the URL bar's history. This was before private browsing and that sort of thing started showing up, and while he wasn't too concerned about what someone might find if they pulled up the browser history, he didn't necessarily want everywhere he's recently gone to appear if someone just happened to sit down at his desk to use the web.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
You wouldn't believe how many people actually browse that way. I have seen my fair share of people that type URLs in the searchfield of their google homepage.
I do. Google spellchecks the URL for me so I don't accidentally get typo-phished. Most times Google will even warn me if the site I'm about to go to may harm my system... Think of this as a manual phishing filter that takes 0% additional resources when not in use, and no effort to disable / re-enable (In FF anyhow: left entry = manual URL; right entry = Search box / URL sanitiser)
I can't use Chrome, because I hate tabs and I want my window management to be handled consistently. Mozilla loves tabs too, but unlike Chrome, they give me the option to easily turn off the features I don't want to use. I can already use Firefox without a URL bar. But the point is, it's left up to me. As long as Chrome doesn't respect my well-justified and not unusual choices, I'll not even consider trying it.