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Google Wants To Kill the URL (wired.com)
As Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most controversial initiative yet: fundamentally rethinking URLs across the web. From a report: Uniform Resource Locators are the familiar web addresses you use everyday. They are listed in the web's DNS address book and direct browsers to the right Internet Protocol addresses that identify and differentiate web servers. In short, you navigate to WIRED.com to read WIRED so you don't have to manage complicated routing protocols and strings of numbers. But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. The resulting opacity has been a boon for cyber criminals who build malicious sites to exploit the confusion. They impersonate legitimate institutions, launch phishing schemes, hawk malicious downloads, and run phony web services -- all because it's difficult for web users to keep track of who they're dealing with. Now, the Chrome team says it's time for a massive change.
"People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering Manager. "They're hard to read, it's hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don't think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone -- they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we're figuring out the right way to convey identity."
If you're having a tough time thinking of what could possibly be used in place of URLs, you're not alone. Academics have considered options over the years, but the problem doesn't have an easy answer. Porter Felt and her colleague Justin Schuh, Chrome's principal engineer, say that even the Chrome team itself is still divided on the best solution to propose. And the group won't offer any examples at this point of the types of schemes they are considering. The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices.
"People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering Manager. "They're hard to read, it's hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don't think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone -- they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we're figuring out the right way to convey identity."
If you're having a tough time thinking of what could possibly be used in place of URLs, you're not alone. Academics have considered options over the years, but the problem doesn't have an easy answer. Porter Felt and her colleague Justin Schuh, Chrome's principal engineer, say that even the Chrome team itself is still divided on the best solution to propose. And the group won't offer any examples at this point of the types of schemes they are considering. The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices.
It is not acceptable for Google that some browsing bypasses Google search engine when people directly type in URLs.
Google, just doing its part in ripping the last bits of the 'web' to shreds. I guess they really do want their search engine to be the place from which all information originates.
PRO-TIP: There's this magical thing called a bookmark that stores all those 'so-over-complicated' URL thingies under a name that you can even change yourself so your teeny little human brain can understand it! Ain't that amazing?</extreme_sarcasm>
Seriously, Google, what the actual fuck is wrong with you?
Or is it that people have become so fucking dumb that they really can't type in {website}.{top_level_domain}? Considering all the stupid shit I see in the news pretty much every single day anymore I'd be very tempted to believe that, too.
I can guess what Googles solution will be: if you want to host web content you need to purchase a virtual website on their cloud and then they will issue you a code that people can use to type or scan into Chrome. After all, think of the terrorists and/or the children.
With Google mail and voice and everything else and now this. I guess Google wants to be the 21st century AOL.
At least we won't have to worry about the endless stream of CDs in the mail.
People have a really hard time understanding URLs
Understatement of the year. "People" don't understand URLs at all. That doesn't mean we should let Google be the arbiter of identity on the internet.
Some people have a really hard time understanding URLs
FTFY.
Computer savvy people have been using the Internet just fine since the '90s thank-you-very-much. Just because X% of the population doesn't understand that an URL is like a phone number doesn't mean we need to replace it with a broken design.
They'll probably want a 16 hexadecimal string with a dotted 48 bit octal sub identifier. Because it's obvious.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Seriously. Don't fix things that are not broken.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Didn't AOL try this back in the 90s with the 'AOL Keyword'? IIRC, it failed miserably.
Actually AOL keywords were very very successful and AOL charged big bucks to sell keywords to companies, but eventually domain names and URLs were cheaper to get (unless someone else registered it first) and the DNS system wasn't a monopoly so competition drove down prices further.
There's too long, but then there's also indecipherable.
URL shortening services are actually another problem for phishing, since it obfuscates the link by design.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.