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Google Is Serious, Chrome 13 Hides URL Bar
An anonymous reader writes "A few months ago, we heard about Google playing with the idea of killing the URL bar in its Chrome browser. Chrome 13 provides a first view how this feature will work. There is a new flag and a context menu option that hides the traditional URL bar and moves a shortened version into each tab."
And all this is being done for what? To give me 50 pixels? Whoop-dee-doo.
I am starting to dislike progress. I need a drink.
Man, you really need that seminar!
When will I be able to set Chrome so that it doesn't use tabs and opens new windows instead? Firefox has always been able to do this. Why is Chrome forcing me to use tabs when I already have a perfectly nice window manager?
Kind of a nice way to offset the loss of vertical pixels as monitors move from 4:3(1280*1024) to 16:10(1280*800) to 16:9(1366*768)..
I'm still waiting for a sleek UI with no buttons, sliders, toggles, or anything else. I just want a brushed aluminum skin on everything, with no controls at all.
I use the data from the URL bar.
I need it for my job. It is part of the required sourcing for research.
Half of my clients seem to think typing something in google is how to get around on the internet. I still have to regularly explain bookmarks, favorites, etc and when troubleshooting half of the time they cant actually tell me the URL they are having trouble reaching or getting to work in their browser because all they do is type the name of the place in google, this change will simply help facilitate that ignorance. If it was infallible I wouldn't have a problem with it but search results vary and nearly every spyware infection and rootkit I have had to remove tends to come from clicking on the first thing that comes up on a search.
stupid.
since google is sucking up all the world's information, there is no reason to leave google's servers
I wonder if I'll still be able to use the F6 shortcut to place the cursor in the address bar? Having to use the mouse to type in a web address would be enough to make me stop using chrome.
Okay, Chrome 13 has a flag to hide the URL bar. They've clearly spent hours of work enabling this behavior. While this story is less interesting because the feature is trivial and not even active by default, it is still very interesting because it's about a Google product. So thank you for the info.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I kinda see why they are doing this. They are trying to make web browsers more like using an application vs. browsing. And in Web Applications Coding it so it can handle Forward, Back and Refresh, and links to the location bar adds complexity of your code. However it seems they are doing this at the expense of non-Web Applications. Eg. I went to Slashdot I saw this article. I clicked on the link read the content and hit the back button then hit comments.
I would prefer a way for HTML to tell the browser that I am an application where I forbid the back and forward buttons to work on my tab (or have it go back to the external site that found it) Then just removing the feature
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Direct understandable interfaces changed to obfuscated, hidden, over-engineered nonsense. Is Google now taking its cues from the MIcrosoft Office interface design team?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Hopefully Chrome 13 will check for dupes!
Oh, wait, this isn't a dupe..
Well, maybe Chrome 13 will have an option to make the spell-checker mandatory - that will sure help the lazy editors!
Oh, wait, the spelling is fine. Hmm.
Well, maybe Chrome 13 will have a way to go the original source, not some 3rd-level blogging of a blog post!
Oh, wait, it is the original...
Well, maybe Chrome 13 will have a 'nerd' or 'stuff that matters' filter! That might stop Taco from posting these off topic, link grabbing, troll stories!
Oh, wait, this is a tech story...
There are similar add-ons for Chrome, but Vimperator on Firefox is fabulous for my needs. Everything else looks a cluttered, redundant mess. I am despise the URL bar.
Now you get the point. Google Search is the official bookmark system for Chrome and nobody needs to know the URL because you can always find the best information by punching keywords into your bookmark system.
Rod Taylor
This is a guaranteed fraud magnet.
The main reason I DON'T use Chrome is because I LIKE having my 12+ most-used sites in a drop-down URL bar, like every other major browser has. I don't want to click on pictures.
Having to open a new tab, then having to figure out which of the 8 (only 8) pictures corresponds with the web site I am trying to get, then clicking it, is WAY more complicated. And sites that use similar color schemes are hard to tell apart at first glance in the little picture.
Google, some of us are text-based (CLI forever) people, not picture-based people. That's the main problem I have with the OS-X interface, icons with no words under them, dammit!
you have a browser that does what you want, but you're complaining because not every browser does everything you want?
As for PCs, I took Dr. Spork's comment more in the sense of "And that's why I'm sticking with Firefox."
does Google have a gun to your head to ensure that you use Chrome?
Chrome OS uses Chrome as its shell, and I haven't seen any evidence that a Chrome OS device will let the user replace Chrome with another browser. Furthermore, the article hints that Android Browser will eventually merge with Chrome.
All security issues aside:
In TFA also other layout options are illustrated. Tabs in the sidebar, finally. With the widespread use of wide screen monitors, esp. for notebooks, I just _hate_ how vertical screen space is wasted by bloated interfaces like the MS ribbon. At least give us an option to move them to the side and align them vertically.
So thank you Google UI engineers, good move
True, a 720p class monitor is a downgrade. But when you replace a 1280x1024 pixel monitor with a 1920x1080 pixel monitor, you gain vertical pixels, and you also gain the ability to show two pages side-by-side.
One of the most useful 'innovations' in browsers over the years - aside from tabs - has been the permanent search box, so that we can fire off searches really easily.
Chrome combined this into the URL box as - reasonably - we don't need two separate boxes cluttering up the display.
But now to hide the combi-box takes away the useful feature that we had - the ever-present search box.
Plus, lets not forget that this is a phishers wet dream - you mean we can't see the url of the page we are looking at, just how it looks, and the title in tab? Hide the url, and it becomes a lot more difficult to be sure that the page you are submitting details to is the page that you intended.
Although I'm currently a Chrome user, I will switch away if this change gets forced on me.
The day they drop the address bar is the same day I stop using Chrome.
Direct understandable interfaces changed to obfuscated, hidden, over-engineered nonsense. Is Google now taking its cues from the MIcrosoft Office interface design team?
Sadly, everyone seems to be trying to ape Windows these days. Last night I told my Ubuntu laptop to shut down and Gnome gave me some stupid Windows-style 'Program Unknown is not responding' dialog box. Like I give a crap, kill -15 and shut down.
Ugh. If I wanted to run Windows I'd be running Windows.
Yeah, I've noticed this behavior in various users (and even otherwise-knowledgeable colleagues!) too. Drives me insane, why would you ever do that? If you know you want to go to youtube, typing youtube.com in your address bar is easier than going to Google, then searching for "youtube", then clicking. Or better still, put a damn bookmark in place.
</rant>
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I would prefer a way for HTML to tell the browser that I am an application where I forbid the back and forward buttons to work on my tab (or have it go back to the external site that found it)
Then add an event listener for clicks on your links that does {location.replace(some_other_url); return false}.
Although Chrome never hit my taste to begin with, I would still prefer to know the specific page I'm on without having to guess.
I can only imagine how this "feature" will be put to use by hackers and such. Doppelganger-facebook? Yikes. Improbable, yeah, but you already know that people are stupid enough to fall for it.
When your system doesn't map to the brain of the user that needs to use it, you change the system. Expecting the user to change for the system is futile.
... as in window.location.href. MS just had to be different, so they (and only they) call it the Address Bar. But please, not a third name.
As for the change, I don't care as long as Control-L (Windows) or Command-L (Mac) * unhides it and selects all of the current page's URL, so that typing replaces it. That's the way power users type a new URL using only the keyboard anyway.
* That's L, as in "Location Bar". Works in MSIE too, but without the current page's URL.
Mod this up.
Because it corrects spelling errors.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
Read the comments starting with oldest-first. It's either depressing or hilarious, depending on your view of life.
The best ones (like my parents) are the ones who put "www.youtube.com" into the Google search bar on their browser that's about 2cm away from the address bar. And my mother is assistant manager of the IT dept at a major medical lab yet I can't get her to change...
Ow. My brain... ow.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Alternatively there is Pentadactyl a fork of that project. I move over as they were faster to provide Firefox 4 support.
Merge Gnome and KDE!
I hope that there will be a setting to make the address bar always visible.
It is a security risk to hide the address bar. A hacked website could re-direct you and you would not have a clue!
With it hidden most people will have no real idea what website that they are on.
Yea you can manually check, but who is going to do that on a regular basis?
Besides that next to the address area are the icons for the add-ons I use all the time. Even with the address bar gone, I will not gain any screen real estate.
has no one ever heard of F11 you hit that button and bam you got full screen with no url bar anyway so why the update to do it automatically
Sorry, wrong story.
Now if you see a screenshot of a browser viewing a website you also see the URL (in the location bar).
In Chrome you won't. This is bad. The URL is best thing about the internet.
"The feature has to be enabled via a flag in a recent Canary or nightly build version of Chrome 13. To activate teh hidden URL bar, users will also have to right-click a tab and select “Hide the toolbar”Besides killing the URL bar, the new feature also moves the tools menu, hides any extension and introduces new back/forward buttons."
That's great and all, but the article completely leaves out what the required flag is to enable the feature....
As the article itself points out, this makes it harder to see the URL of a site you visit. Anything that makes it harder for users to carry out the most basic security precautions is a Very Bad Thing. Seriously. The phishers must be positively drooling over this new user interface.
Interface minimalism is all well and good, but there are some things that need to be shown constantly. The URL bar is one of them.
I still prefer the separate process per tab Chrome provides over the alternatives. And, as long as I can still enable the location bar if I want to, it's all good.
Google would prefer it this way, the longer they can keep you on their site, the greater the chance of increased ad revenue.
Google usually does wax minimalistic in it's approach to design.
But in this case I think they are trying to out-apple apple
This is like the way Apple refuses to ship its machines with a two button mouse, or two button track pad.
There's a point when stubborn adherence to minimalism becomes annoying and counter-productive, and even ostentatious in it's own passive-aggressive way.
I would completely agree if it actually were the "best information", unfortunately with google and most other search engines it doesn't work that way. All to often the results are more the result of rank manipulation than by actual quality of information. Sometimes I think the biggest advancement in search engines would be for one to simply add a checkbox that allows the user to never see search results from certain sites again...if I could banish things like fixya, answers.yahoo.com and stuff like that it would cut my average search time in half.
If they hide the URL bar, most people (as many already do) will search Google for a site they already know the URL of. A lot of the users of our site type our URL into Google's search and then click the top link. Google doing this, just makes them serve up more search results ending up in more revenue for Google.
Eg. F11
The idea is appealing, but in this day of high resolution screens it's largely irrelevant. Years ago, when I was browsing in 640x480 and then 800x600 trying to fit as much content on the screen as I could was important. Back then I browsed with the window maximized. Nowadays my browsers are windowed. Sites are so much longer than the vertical height of the window that an extra 40-50 pixels is irrelevant. The vertical orientation of tablets also makes this pointless.
The one environment where this helps is on laptops. So many laptops today are equipped with excessively wide screens that offer little vertical resolution.
But then, I'm sure that the real motivation for this is to make the browser more transparent and enhance the whole "app" experience.
If you want Linux run Slackware.
I read the internet for the articles.
The same amount of brilliance as Windows helpfully offering to hide the extensions of known file types. #DoNotWant
I navigated to google.com/ponies and my hopes and dreams were irrevocably crushed.
And then we'll see add-ons for chrome that display the URL.
Full circle!
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
brushed aluminum skin is not an option
however, you can get chrome plating
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The windows taskbar takes up too much space, lets get rid of it. Netbooks are too sluggish running lots of programs anyways. If you want to run another program close the one you are running, we can call the next version of windows for networks "Microsoft Disk Operating System."
If memory serves me right, didn't the early versions of AOL work a similar way as the Chrome browser? A user types in a keyword into the AOL broswer and AOL matched the keyword with a URL, website pops up. A user types a keyword in Chrome and Chrome searches your history or uses Google's search engine to match the keyword with a URL, website pops up. I know you can change the search engines in Chrome but the end result is the same; the user doesn't have to know how the Internet works to use the Internet.
History repeats itself.
So. Bing/Google/Yahoo are the new AOL. Just great... sigh.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I hope firefox doesn't go copying the Chrome interface further, removing the address bar as well...
do we seek to achieve? if i no longer have immediate access to the navigation bar, i no longer have access to immediately navigate away from a site ive visited. I cant see direct changes or actions in the gets and posts im using as a developer. I place my trust implicitly in google to detect and proactively handle threats to my browsing as i literally have no immediate idea what site im viewing (google.com vs google.harbin.haxxor.ch.)
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yeah, 50 pixes on a 4" smart phone screen when they unify it with Android... That's a pretty big deal. Do you see a URL bar on your smartphone now?
Yeah, it's hidden on phones, with no problem at all. To get full Chrome on a phone, it needs the ability to hide too.
Anyone who is clamoring about how horrible this is must not own a touch screen phone.
I8-D
Mostly agreed, but I don't understand sticking with Fedora 14. Do you expect Gnome to come to their senses and provide a full backward-compatible desktop in the future? If not, maybe it is time to try a different environment such as XFCE on Fedora 15? That's the way I am leaning, after also trying Fedora 15 defaults on a spare laptop. My main concern is that they seem to migrate more system functionality into Gnome every year: power management, network management, device hotplugging, etc. I want to keep my system without being tied to Gnome.
Oddly enough, I only ever started using Gnome because it was getting too hard to maintain my fvwm environment on Red Hat and early Fedora versions. I've been fighting every Gnome upgrade ever since, as it required a treasure hunt to restore the most important features each time.
I have simple needs: multiple monitors, virtual desktops in a 2D grid, hotkey switching between them with ctl-arrow keys, lots of XTerms with proper session management to remember their sizes/locations, focus-follows-mouse, raise-on-decoration-click (not raise on interaction), and an easily reconfigured background menu or auto-hiding menu bar to get to some frequent tasks w/o wasting screen space. I never minimize windows, and I infrequently move them between virtual desktops when I change my mind about groupings of tasks.
Lynx never had no steenking URL bar, and it always worked just fine without it.
AccountKiller
I believe hubris is a better word choice than futile.
Chrome is a data collection application with a browser as a front-end. Google wants all input to be entered in the Google Search bar for the purpose of data collection. Using the address bar for direct navigation does not help Google's data collection efforts. I was surprised when I saw the address bar in the first version of Chrome. My only comment is to ask what took Google so long to remove the address bar.
For those needing some background, there is a company called AC Neilsen that data mines television viewing. They are well known for hooking up a black box to a family's television in order to collect the TV viewing data. Chrome, Gmail, etc. are nothing more than data collecting black boxes. If you enjoy the applications - great. Google will make their applications as enticing as needed in order to get you to use it.
I'll be happy at last, when they stop showing the URL and tabs completely and send them by e-mail...
If people are conditioned to not having a URL bar, then won't it make it easier to set up phishing scam sites?
Google is really going off the reservation with respect to minimalism.
This is brilliant. It is so much more elegant. It shows you exactly what you need to see when you need to see it, the rest of the time you don't have to bother.
I want it widely known that I have some blueprints for this EXACT design that I came up with in 2009, for Firefox 4. Google should pay me! Not that I ever published anything at the time, because my real friends laughed at me and I was afraid you internet people would too, but I can see now that the tables have turned.
Unsavvy users already don't know what the URL bar is for, but that's no reason to hide it from them. Google should instead be doing users a favor by forcing them to pay attention to it when necessary.
If nothing else, the URL bar is one of the best security features a browser has, especially against phishing attacks and other URL tricks. However, if the user can't see it or doesn't understand it, then it is useless.
Can we have the tabs autohide the way you can have the windows taskbar autohide? Then the web takes up the entire screen...or should I just hit f11?
Since I have enabled this feature I have been duped, misled, infected and raped 13 times (each). Clear evidence of your righteousness.
I'm a Chrome engineer. This summary is wrong. The Compact Nav mode is an experiment we're testing. There are no plans right now to turn it on by default for Chrome 13 or any other Chrome release, and in fact there are currently far too many issues with it for us to fix in the M13 timeframe even if we wanted to turn it on by default.
Pretty nice for only $1220...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824176177
Current users are geeks and more likely to switch back to a closed browser as soon as free [as in beer] ones start "doing it wrong!" Firefox's been alienating us since version 3.
That is the a reason Chrome grew so quickly, regardless of whether you personally hated the awesomebar or not. For a shamelessly well-known profit motive, Chrome starts alienating everyone, in turn. Is it a wonder that people will just return to FF? Oh, wait, there are MANY other choices, like Safari / Opera (beer free).
Most non-geek Chromers will just damn the torpedoes and take the IE bullet already sitting like every patient drug dealer who knows former "clients" eventually return regardless of the circumstance. IE-based corporations like it because it doesn't sport trendy GUIs.
The system has worked just fine for countless other users who are capable of logical, rational thought processes. Just because a bunch of morons now have access to computers doesn't mean we need to change them.
Would you say the same thing about cars? Or ships? Or dangerous power tools? That we need to change them to suit people who are too stupid to handle dangerous items responsibly (where changing them probably means removing features or abilities that make the tool useful in the first place)?
The fact is, people are NOT equal. Some are stupider than others, and some just can't handle doing certain tasks in a safe manner. Instead of trying to change the machines to suit a minority of users who have no business using the machines, it makes more sense to just keep the machines out of their hands. There's a lot of people, for instance, who are alcoholics. They cannot operate cars safely. What do you propose for these people? That we make cars more crash-proof, so they can wreck at 75mph without getting hurt? Of course, this won't help any hapless pedestrians they run into. How about just not allowing alcoholics to drive in the first place? That's what rational civilizations do; only people who are responsible are allowed to drive, the rest have to take public transit. (Even better civilizations make it so public transit is actually the better option, so that only people who need to drive, like for work (delivery trucks, etc.), do so, as driving is an unavoidably dangerous task that can never be made truly safe as long as humans are in control.)
Here's another example: airplanes. Have you ever gotten in a cockpit? The controls are quite complex, between engine gauges, navigation controls, etc. How many people do you know who could handle that without any training at all? Probably none. So should we make airplanes easier to operate so that people need no training to get in and start flying a 747? No, it's simple: we don't allow anyone to operate one without extensive (and expensive) training, and we trust those who are trained and skilled to fly the rest of us around.
Pentadactyl is a Vimperator fork. I started using it as they were quicker to bring out Firefox 4 support.
I like Hide url from Google Chrome browser http://www.bangladeshi-actresses.co.cc/
this change will simply help facilitate that ignorance.
I think that's actually Google's intention. Make a browser the ignorant can use.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here here. It took a few hours to get used to vimperator, but now I can't live without it. Full navigation of websites without using the mouse is a cool thing, and the ctrl-i command to open up a gvim window on an edit box is awesome when preparing forum, trac, or wiki posts. Instant "y" command for copying the current URL, "p" to open the URL or search term currently in the clipboard, and lots of other useful shortcuts.
In my browser, the URL is tucked in a small line down at the bottom, there if I need it but otherwise out of mind. If that's the way chome is headed with its UI, then I think it's a Good Thing.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
"The URL bar in Chrome is still active by default, but there is a flag to hide it." And "To activate teh [sic] hidden URL bar, users will also have to right-click a tab and select “Hide the toolbar”" So all this debate around this being a bad idea in general because _you_ aren't willing to try it out, or comments with titles like "Is Google becoming AOL?" miss the point hardcore.
If you really want a hard core browsing experience, try UZBL.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
Read the comments starting with oldest-first. It's either depressing or hilarious, depending on your view of life.
Tried the link, but got tired of trying to figure out which of the 25 third party scriptlets enabled the comments view through NoScript.
No thanks.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
There's a Chrome Extension for that, it's called personal blocklist by Google and it allows you to block URL's from future searches.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
does this already
and gives you handy vim commands to control your browser
I wholeheartedly agree. It took me some days to fully get the hang of it, but now i can't browse without it any more. I love the control you have and the speed with which you can browse the intarweb.
I came across it by accident because i just wanted a way to kill firefox using :wq :)
Another big feature is that when somebody else tries to use your browser, they will give up frustrated by the fact that "nothing works like usual" :D
Is it possible Google is trying to get users to stop using a browser to reach sites directly through a URL and always default to reaching them through a search? You don't need that much space for a URL if all you use is a couple of keywords in a search to reach your destination.
Google has had this functionality for a few months now. You have to log in to your Google (or Gmail) account and it will allow you to filter results exactly the way you describe.
...and any small screen device. As it is on my netbook I have my taskbar on the side for maximum vertical space.
Here you go
Haven't tried it, but I am going to.
I have a hard enough time explaining to my users what a URL is, what all the stuff in the domain name means, and why it is important to pay attention to it. The users who can't or won't do this are precisely the ones likely to hide the URL bar (assuming they figure out how to do so, which is a stretch for most of them).
As I read this article, the feature is not set by default, but the mere existence of it fills me with fear.
So what...now I would need to use "google" to go to any site I want if I only used chrome? This sounds like a huge boost to their ad revenue streams. I don't understand why you would want your url bar gone...what if I want to access my router, my ip camera, or an ftp site. Granted, there are many other ways. This just seems silly. They better provide an option to turn the url bar back on, like the menu in firefox 4. However, I don't care that much, since I don't use chrome.
Thank you, good sir or madam. That was amazing.
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
Er...
The location bar is the preferred way to search in Chrome. Also, their bookmarking is better than most browsers. Not sure how any of that drives you back to a search engine more than any other browser.
...but where is the trend with address bars going?
Browsers no longer show you the address bar or hide the real address from you. How can you see get parameters in a so called user-friendly address?
You tell people to type the address and they type it in the search engine or some toolbar they have installed. They don't even know where the address bar is...that's real progress. People type facebook in the google search and click the first result...it's a lot faster to type face(...) in the address bar and let autocomplete handle the rest, but no, search engine is obviously much better.
Does anybody remember times, when browsers used to return real http error to the user...you immediately knew if there was a problem with the dns or connection timeout or perhaps 'Page not found'. Now you only get 'There was some problem with the page. Do you want FOO to check and diagnose why the page does not display? Make sure your cable is connected and blahblahblahblah...'. Or even better, it redirects you to some search engine that was installed on the machine. Did you mean to type BAR instead of FOO? You have no idea if you've misspelled the address or the server is not responding or wth is going on.
That's not progress for me, that's stupidity and laziness. Post addresses and zip codes are hard to remember too, but you don't write 'search FOOBAR on google and send it to the first result' on the letter you (snail)mail, do you?
You're probably underestimating the number ;)
Looking at Google Insights, the top 10 searches in the UK for the last 30 days are:
1. facebook
2. youtube
3. bbc
4. hotmail
5. you
6. google (WTF?!)
7. ebay
8. mail
9. yahoo
10. weather
When I watch parents, friends and people at work use a browser, they hardly ever use the location bar. The only things they do really use are the back button and bookmarks. Most people do go to the same handful of sites all the time anyways.
;)
If there were an easy way to keep that functionality and optionally auto-hide the location bar, I think that would be useful. Especially with laptop display geometry, a lot of us would get more utility reclaiming the space and hiding the unused browser junk.
And no, I was not a huge fan of the ribbon.
Chrome 14 will hide the Browser entirely!
You have to enable a launch-time flag in the 'this might fuck things up' options area. Even then you have to tick a context menu option to actually hide the bar. But let's all panic and say it hides it by default, because that generates headlines.
Press: CTRL L
If they can do that right, then (in Firefox) it highlights the correct box. Then they can just start typing. Good luck!
ctrl+k youtube enter does the job with fewer buttons, and has the side benefit of making several machines on the internet furiously discuss my intention, all for the benefit of my laziness. That alone makes it worth it.
Exactly, it opens the "open" dialog box. It is not essentially the URL bar. The URL bar is the URL bar, the "open" dialog box is the open dialog box.
F6 highlights the location bar. If you want the same result as other browsers, then you use F6.
Sadly, vimium is nowhere near vimperator.
So we should ban people that don't use bookmarks from using the internet?
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Why go to such lengths? I'm just saying, why bother accommodating them and their dumb ways? Leave things set up properly, and hopefully they'll learn eventually, if not, that's their problem. Don't dumb down everything for a few morons.
Getting rid of bookmarks is just as dumb as this idea that we don't need directories (folders) on our computers any more, and we can just use "desktop search" to find files that we want. It's an utterly stupid idea, because while search can be useful for finding something if you know what you're looking for, it's no substitute for proper organization. With files arranged in a sensible hierarchical directory structure, it's easy to find not only things you're looking for, but things you forgot about or don't know exist. Search is only useful if you know exactly what you want, and the keywords that are most likely to find it.
It can take a while to find something you're looking for using Google search (or others), unless you know exactly what you're looking for. By bookmarking something, you can easily go right back to that location later, instead of hoping your Google search will find it again. While this might not be all that useful for finding, say, www.cnn.com or www.slashdot.org, suppose you want to see a particular comment on Slashdot (such as one you made as an Anonymous Coward), to see the replies to it. Good luck finding that on Google. Or suppose you find some really interesting discussion thread on some obscure forum that you read a few months before. You might get lucky and find it on Google, or you might spend 20 minutes sifting through search results trying to find it. Or you might be able to find the forum site, but then have to do more searches to try to find the particular thread you want. With a bookmark, this is not a problem.
Finally, the obligatory car analogy. Most cars I've seen, even now, still have an analog temperature gauge, though most others have been eliminated. There's probably a good reason for this: bad thermostats aren't uncommon, and typically cause either engine overheating or overcooling. Why hasn't this gauge been eliminated because of a bunch of morons who can't understand the concept of "engine overheating"? Because it's useful for everyone else, so they know when to pull over and shut off their car before they cause irreversible damage, or so they know why they're getting crummy fuel economy. Same goes for the oil pressure light. It used to be a gauge, but the intention is the same: to warn you that there's not enough oil pressure and you shouldn't continue driving or else your engine will be destroyed. This doesn't stop morons from doing exactly that, but they still put the warning light there. Of course, you might say, "why not just have the car automatically shut down when this happens?" That's because having a car turn itself off while driving on a busy street or highway could have catastrophic consequences far worse than engine damage. Dumbing things down too much can cause far worse problems than anticipated. Or, you might say, "why not have the car print a warning message in text saying what the problem is?" That I'm not sure about, but I imagine having small-print messages on a small screen in the driver's view probably isn't very safe either, though with the larger navigation screens becoming common, this is probably what'll be normal for future cars, but it took a while for technology to get that far.
In summary: stop trying to dumb everything down for the stupidest members of society. If we do that everywhere, then we'll train everyone to not use their brains, and everyone will be equally stupid, and then society will crumble and collapse as there's no way a society run by idiots can succeed. Brains are like muscles: use them or lose them. Even if you're born a smart kid, it's pretty easy to become a moron adult by being coddled and treated like one, and never being pushed to exercise your brain.
I often feel like we need a BIGGER bar. Or someway to make the address box less forgettable. I take phone calls for a large company. We're not internet focussed but we do have some websites. It very frustrating trying to get certain people to the website. (btw, my wife does the same thing.) The customer calls because that can't get to the website. The problem is always that they are typing the address into the search box, aka the browser window itself. Duh...which one do I pick? And of course, even though the correct one is the first hit, it invariably seems it isn't for them. (thanks personalized results). ....there. I've vented.
I have actually resorted to telling callers to press F6 and start typing without looking because they just can't seem to find the address box. That doesn't alway work either. They just don't get it. How about a special key press to start a tutorial of how to properly use a browser? And have that in ALL browsers.
Dredge
The system has worked just fine for countless other users who are capable of logical, rational thought processes. Just because a bunch of morons now have access to computers doesn't mean we need to change them.
In summary: stop trying to dumb everything down for the stupidest members of society. If we do that everywhere, then we'll train everyone to not use their brains, and everyone will be equally stupid, and then society will crumble and collapse as there's no way a society run by idiots can succeed. Brains are like muscles: use them or lose them. Even if you're born a smart kid, it's pretty easy to become a moron adult by being coddled and treated like one, and never being pushed to exercise your brain.
By this logic, the GUI should never have been invented, and computer code should be typed in assembly. And only people with a degree from MIT should be able to operate them because dumbing it down so the general population can use it is sooooo not kosher. Simplification is a good thing, it frees up more time you can spend actually thinking about the stuff you're doing, and less time spent wrestling with an obfuscated and overly difficult system.
Oh please. GUIs are demonstrably better for many things, such as 1) using applications you only use occasionally and thus don't remember all the command-line arguments for, 2) doing anything that requires visualization. For instance, I use "gkrellm" to keep an eye on hardware activity. That'd be pretty hard to do with a non-graphical interface. CLIs have their place, as do GUIs.
Simplification is only good if you're not losing important functionality in the process. Some things can only be simplified so much, and if you go too far, you'll either lose out on something useful, or in some cases, you may compromise safety.
Should we also remove the requirement for kids to learn basic math, or algebra? After all, it's soooo hard. We could simplify school curricula by not teaching these things at all, right?
I think I'll be happy with this change... the tab centred url bar is a very good idea.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Vimperator seems to have had a little bit of development drama, wherein basically one of the devs who had done little work took it over and claimed it (and the donations) for himself.
Pentadactyl is the fork by the devs who make this claim.
It does seem that Pentadactyl is actually being actively developed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/
Many modern cars already have so many different things going on in the background that they're half driven by wire anyway. Taking this to the next step where you tell the car where to drive is progress and would likely result in many fewer dying in accidents.
Power tools are actually a great example of dumbing down things for safety's sake. The $20 drill you get at home depot that can barely go through an Ikea table isn't what people that make buildings for a living use and will do far less damage to you if your hand slips. More importantly, there are no metaphors to get with a drill. You point it at something, pull the trigger and it drills. People still manage to injure themselves on accident, as they are human. Ideally the drill would be able to look at where it's pointed at and *stop drilling* if it's looking at flesh.
Even airplanes are a great example. I have no idea how to fly a plane, but there is someone that can get paid a great deal of money to fly for me. All I have to do is figure out how to buy the damn tickets from a website somewhere (which could be made easier, really). And even pilots aren't controlling every element of the plane without assistance from a variety of computers.
Most people that use computers on a daily basis aren't computer experts. They're engineers, architects, scientists, lawyers, businesspeople, personal assistants, etc. The computers they use are tools to accomplish something. Some people get it, others don't. But forcing people to use metaphor after metaphor that has nothing to do with their jobs frequently doesn't result in someone that knows what the metaphors mean or how they interact, it simply results in someone that knows how to keep clicking a certain way until the black box gives them something the way it did in the past (at least until they upgraded it and everything moved around to make it more user friendly).
It'll screw up the easiest way to sidestep their would-be "paywall."
Pentadactyl is the new vimperator http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/help/pentadactyl/
When Firefox came out, I switched to it eagerly (early 2000). Then it crashed and took all my info with it. I switched to use Opera, and it proved more stable, more secure. And then I gave up using computers for a long time, like 5 years. Now I am using computer heavily, and believe me, Opera is the best. Here is a screenshot http://i.imgur.com/7yMMf.png. Can you see the URL bar? No, cause there isn't. When you click the grey bar top, then it shows up. Also the tab's are re-sizable, I can just arrange my tabs to show the necessary part of a web page. And boy, that's handy, cause there are all advr. in the pages today. So what are you waiting, switch to Opera. (Hope someone sees this post, in this crowded page, meme face goes here.)
Will they ever allow us to hide the useless download bar? And will there be a version that doesn't gradually suck up all our system resources?
This is absolutely pathetic. Google is proposing it, and society is going to love it. Death to function and information and hello to aesthetics and blissful ignorance.
I love it! :-)
https://www.hsbbc.co.uk/
I know! Why not get rid of everything, and put a big "dial" in the corner. You could label different "channels" on this dial: Facebook, Google and MSN. There could also be a hidden "UHF" dial - where bookmarks would populate the "channels" that you never visit, and want to forget about.
Welcome to the future.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If my computer monitors didn't keep shrinking like a fat guy was sitting on top, then there would be no need to save all this vertical real estate.
1600x1200 -> 1600x1024 -> 1600x900 -> 1600x768 ...
What will Browsers look like when my laptop is 1600x200 ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Cool, this is definitely a good move on Google's behalf. Now all they need to do is ditch the tabs bar as well, and Chrome will become the BEST BROWSER EVER!