Chrome May Drop the URL Bar

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Posted by samzenpus on Sunday February 20, 2011 @08:15AM from the cleaning-things-up dept.

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."

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Who needs the URL bar? by joabj · 2011-02-20 08:18 · Score: 4, Informative

Let Google be your portal to the entire Internet! Sheesh.
1. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by devxo · 2011-02-20 08:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I bet phishers will love this feature...
2. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by NoZart · 2011-02-20 08:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by VanGarrett · 2011-02-20 09:18 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
4. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by VortexCortex · 2011-02-20 09:43 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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)
5. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by aix+tom · 2011-02-20 10:08 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  The danger is not really someone sitting down at his desk to use the web. The danger is giving a presentation to 100+ people on a screen the size of a barn door and then have something embarrassing (like ..uuuu..aaahhhh.. slashdot! Yes! slashdot for example!) hows up in the URL history.
  Of course *cough* that never happened to me *cough* ;-P
6. Re:Who needs the URL bar? by Kell+Bengal · 2011-02-20 11:16 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I've seen it happen at a robotics seminar - poor guy pulled up his video player's history by mistake and all the files were located in "c:/megaporn/" He closed it fast, but not fast enough. We were all very polite to him during the coffee break. :)
  
  --
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  altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Really Stupid Idea by kyrio · 2011-02-20 08:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

I guess the "Really Stupid Idea Department" really does exist because I can only see dropping the address bar as a time-losing feature. In Opera I have two horizontal bars, one for the menu and one for everything else (address, navigation, other buttons). Just make your UI extremely configurable, like Opera's, and you have no problems. I have my tabs stacked vertically on the left hand side. I can have more than 50 tabs visible, this way, with no downside.
1. Re:Really Stupid Idea by zonky · 2011-02-20 08:38 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  And it still won't stop people doing this: http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/toolbars2.png
2. Re:Really Stupid Idea by pieterh · 2011-02-20 08:43 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Did you RTFA? Stacking the tabs at the side is one of the layouts, and the "Address bar hidden in tab" Compact layout is one of four.
  Actually I like the idea a lot, it's especially annoying on smaller resolution screens to lose space to something we hardly ever type or read. Sure, it helps people who know what they're looking for against phishing, but such people are unlikely to click on random emails anyhow.
  Chrome has been doing a good job pushing browsers forwards, after years of bloat and slowdown, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of this.
  
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3. Re:Really Stupid Idea by kubernet3s · 2011-02-20 09:14 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Pretty much every browser has a "fullscreen" F11 option, which hides the Nav bar along with any other pieces of UI. If you need to fullscreen a page to view it better, you always could. You can even navigate with keyboard shortcuts. Its nothing new, of course, but what it is is a forced configuration catering to a rather narrow set of preferences. It's certainly a valid configuration, but it looks to me to be one more example of Google trying to wow us with pointless configuration changes. This isn't going to make the browser run faster or cleaner, it's going to make some people happy because their choice of browser configuration comes out of the box, piss off some other people because their configuration is harder or impossible to set up, and irritate the ever loving shit out of tech-support guys who have to deal with hordes of people answering the question "what is the URL of X site you're visiting?" with confused silence. This is the no-caps-lock look-at-us-we're-so-crazy tactic all over again.
4. Re:Really Stupid Idea by Inner_Child · 2011-02-20 09:24 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  While I wholeheartedly agree that this is incredibly stupid, I have to wonder where all the ranting about this was a year ago when it was posted.
  (This is how old these mockups are.)
  
  --
  Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
5. Re:Really Stupid Idea by Runaway1956 · 2011-02-20 11:49 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Something we hardly ever type or read? Mmmm-kay. If you say so. Personally, I often type domain names, and even more often read them. Maybe it's just 'cause I'm an old bastard, and I'm set in my ways, but I actually do read that address bar.
  
  --
  "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Okay, I like my screen real estate... by guyminuslife · 2011-02-20 08:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

...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.
1. Re:Okay, I like my screen real estate... by geek · 2011-02-20 08:34 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  AOL tried hiding addresses with their keywords and look how dumb their user base got. I still see idiot AOL users who have no freaking clue what a URL is.
2. Re:Okay, I like my screen real estate... by netsharc · 2011-02-20 08:48 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Eh, nowadays people just type what they want in the Google Search bar, remember the Facebook login debacle?
  On the other hand, URLs are going back to the AOL keyword origins anyway, look at this domains: http://nyti.ms/, http://flic.kr/, http://youtu.be/ . Yes, they're real. And yes, I hate them.
  
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3. Re:Okay, I like my screen real estate... by guyminuslife · 2011-02-20 10:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  And that's probably the reason Google thinks it's a great idea. If you just search instead of using the URL bar, you're feeding their core business.
  Hell, I can imagine them going through all the trouble of maintaining the Chrome browser *just for that*. Nobody should use the URL bar again! In 10 years nobody will even remember what it was.
  
  --
  I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Lets go phishing! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-02-20 08:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sounds like a GREAT way to make phishing attempts easier
1. Re:Lets go phishing! by fearlezz · 2011-02-20 08:57 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Indeed. Years ago the address bar was even re-introducted on popup windows to make it harder for badguys. I hate that it takes the space, but it is neccesary to protect users. TFA suggests it'll be optional to hide the address bar, I think it's just foolish.
  
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  .sig: No such file or directory
Ummmm, no by geek · 2011-02-20 08:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sorry but I don't like searching for every single thing when I already know the address. This is just dumb. Far too much emphasis place on searching these days. I rarely need to search anymore as I've been online long enough to basically know where most of the important stuff is.
Just an attempt to generate hits for google here. I dumped Chrome for Firefox the other day for reasons like this. Google controls enough, it's time to take them down a notch. They make some cool stuff but I'm not willing to tie so much into one company.
1. Re:Ummmm, no by Sam+Douglas · 2011-02-20 08:56 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  )
  Sorry.
2. Re:Ummmm, no by NoZart · 2011-02-20 09:06 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Don't ever do that again.
3. Re:Ummmm, no by awshidahak · 2011-02-20 11:23 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  )
  There, I got your other one for you.
Great Idea by Haedrian · 2011-02-20 08:33 · Score: 4, Funny

We at the National Phishing Association greatly support this suggestion.
Minimalism taken too far by caywen · 2011-02-20 08:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Mozilla already experimenting on this by bmuon · 2011-02-20 08:40 · Score: 5, Informative

Mozilla already has a Labs project that goes even further by hiding ALL the UI and showing it only on demand. It's called Home Dash.
Re:first by AK+Marc · 2011-02-20 08:43 · Score: 4, Funny

First, you don't need to sign your posts "bitch." From the fact you were looking for FP, we already knew you were.

Also, even with a FP, you could at least say something just as inane but a little more on topic, like:

Instead of showing the URL bar all the time, it be hidden within tabs.
"It be hidden? What do we pay the editors for? It is hidden, or it would be hidden or something. Come on, don't we have anyone here who hasn't outsourced their job to Elbonia?"

But thanks for trying. It was a half-assed job that I wouldn't be proud of, but if that's all you have, then frame it and show it to your mother every time she comes into the basement to refill your Cheetos.

--
Learn to love Alaska
lynx? by jd142 · 2011-02-20 09:11 · Score: 3, Interesting

So basically google is making a version of lynx that will show pictures and text formatting? Oh, wait, even lynx has a basic interface that makes it, what's that word...useful. That's it. Chrome is already too minimal for my tastes. It's ok to have a few buttons up there. Honest.
What's funny is that we're seeing a reverse in computing ability. I remember back when a 14" monitor was standard. When we got those 17" crts(15.75" viewable) we marveled at the screen real estate. Now at work we have either dual 19" or dual 21" monitors. But the trend actually seems to be towards smaller screens. At our school, 99% of the students have laptops or netbooks with the same physical screen size as the crt monitors we trashed almost a decade ago. If you asked us in 2001 if we'd give up a 22" widescreen for a 14" or even 10" screen we'd have laughed you out of the building.
Just give in and make a tablet/netbook version of chrome and a full featured, full interface version for desktops and laptops.
Re:first by flappinbooger · 2011-02-20 09:13 · Score: 3, Funny

how about "I accidentally the url bar"

--
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Re:first by Grishnakh · 2011-02-20 09:19 · Score: 4, Funny

Instead of showing the URL bar all the time, it be hidden within tabs.
Arrr! There be nothing wrong with this style of writing, matey!
Just make it optional, you bastards! by Dr.+Spork · 2011-02-20 09:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.