Google wants to get rid of URLs but doesn’t know what to use instead (opens in new tab)

Let's assume (mostly) good intentions from google. The article mentions that users don't understand URLs.

Pause to allow a moment to blame users for not trying. Then let's actually approach the problem constructively instead of blaming users.

As I see it, the URLs contain two parts that matter to the user: the domain and then everything after that. (Scheme they can either handle or has been made moot by https everywhere, port is rarely used for the average user, etc)

Domains actually ARE bad for the average user, because they identify a machine (or machine group) while the user cares about a company/individual identity. This is why it took 15 years to get people to stop assuming all websites started with "www". The domain works fine...for techies. It is poor for what users expect.

As for everything else...the path, query params, and hash are all interpreted by the end machine. Some sites try to make it human usable (my thanks), but even those are consistant from one to another. So to Joe or Jane User, these are meaningless.

It is easy to blame google and even easier to blame users. I love the url and hate efforts to hide it... but there really are tasks it does a poor job of that we have no particular good option for.

Rather than blame the url (or these other parties) we should figure out a good way to address (pun unintended but appreciated) these issues.

I don't know why we would assume mostly good intentions. URLs are a way to link directly to online data. Without such a direct pointer you would have to .. I don't know ... 'search'.

Syntax highlighting is all I think they should do. If they want to color "http:" red to show that it's insecure, fine, but don't hide it entirely.

In 69, the version that just came out, they have begun to sometimes hide the subdomain. It threw me for a loop, because someone sent me a link to the mobile version of Wikipedia:

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/

but the URL bar said just:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/

The page layout was very different, and I wanted to switch to normal. But at first it looked like I was at the normal URL and maybe Wikipedia had changed its look and feel overnight.

Thankfully you can disable this in chrome://flags, at "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Scheme and Trivial Subdomains." But this still doesn't bring back "http:"

Firefox too now hides "http:" but you can get it back in about:config, by setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false.

I believe that getting rid of URLs will further take control away from users of the web towards search engines, which is likely Google's actual intension behind these efforts. If you have a full URL that you can write down on paper, there's still a way to get around the search engine. Once we lose the technical detail of URLs, that won't work anymore.

Is this AMP 2.0?

URLs might have security issues, but they are one of the main reasons the internet became such a success.