
Google May Kill Chrome URL Bar - wiks
http://www.conceivablytech.com/5746/products/google-may-kill-chrome-url-bar/
======
enomar
Pretty sensationalist headline. "Google exploring ways to increase screen
space for content" would be more accurate, but I guess that doesn't get
clicks.

~~~
pak
No, I think you're underestimating this potential change. It really seems that
Google wants people to not realize they are using a web browser when they are
browsing the web, and the URL bar is one of the last notable things separating
typical browser UI with that of desktop applications.

Defaults are important because so few people change them or even notice them.
Hiding the URL bar by default will make some new Chrome users not even realize
it is there, and yet more will eventually neglect to use it properly. The web
then becomes like a HyperCard stack, with Google as the top card (by default).
I'm sure this is exactly how Google wants the web to be, but it's not going to
help create knowledgable web users.

I'm sure you've heard of users that google "www.nytimes.com" to go to the New
York Times, because they already don't know how to use the URL bar or what a
URL is and equate Google with getting anywhere on the web. Think about how
this change is going to influence people of that technical caliber.

~~~
eco
That was my first thought as well but after reading the article I'm not quite
so conspiratorial about it. Regular users do not understand or properly use
the URL bar. They may indeed want to do what you say but part of it is
definitely just clearing up even more screen real estate and this is a fairly
clever way to do it. The URL will still be there but only when you want to see
it. If I'm understanding this correctly it'll be while the page is loading or
if you click the tab it'll turn into a URL bar. I'm a little torn on the idea
because I like quick glances at the URL but it would clear up an entire row
and I can still type/see the URL if I need to with an extra click. I think
I'll have to actually use for a few hours to decide if I love it or hate it.

I did just think of one problem though. Phishing will be even easier so
they'll really have to step up their detection and warnings for those.

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SandB0x
One of my favourite things about Chrome is its efficient use of vertical
space. Here's Chrome side by side with Firefox on my laptop:

<http://i.imgur.com/7Sda0.png>

(in fact, when Chrome is maximised the space above the tab disappears, saving
another 15 or so pixels)

Would be very happy with a little more room though. The compact mode looks
good, as long as the keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+k or Alt+d) still work.

Edit: Thanks, will look into your suggestions. These are the basic installs of
Chrome and FF however, so I think it's a fair comparison.

~~~
mryall
The compact size comes mainly because Chrome has discarded the default window
format, title bar and menu bar. An interesting question to ponder is, _What if
every application did that?_ Wouldn't your desktop experience be much more
confusing due to the inconsistencies in how each application was laid out?

~~~
code_duck
Personally, I go back and forth between Linux, Mac OS and Windows so I'm used
to inconsistency.

Also, the applications I use are already highly inconsistent:

\- Gimp has an interface which discards the patterns present on every platform
in existence

\- Browsers are already all different - Safari, Chrome, FF

\- Kate, Komodo and Notepad++ are all pretty different - then there's vi.

~~~
jberryman
> Gimp has an interface which discards the patterns present on every platform
> in existence

Do you say that because of the multiple windows? If so Apple's Interface
Builder seems to follow the same convention.

~~~
code_duck
It is somewhat similar to Mac applications, but where's the menu bar at the
top? Gimp doesn't even use the functionality present for that on Mac OS or
Linux, instead putting a menu into each image window.

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thought_alarm
Incidentally, the original NCSA Mosaic browser had no URL bar. In its place
was a drop-down list containing the browse history. To type a URL you would
select "Open URL" from the menu, or hit Command+U.

Likewise, early versions of Netscape also hid the URL bar by default, and used
Command+L to present a URL dialog box (behavior that's still present in
Firefox today, when the URL bar is hidden).

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burgerbrain
This will have the effect of further decreasing the _positive_ feedback for
HTTPS'd websites. Browsers already have plenty of negative feedback, but have
always been sorely lacking positive feedback and this will only exasperate the
problem.

~~~
MasterScrat
Another issue regarding security, is the fact that a phishing website will
look a lot more convincing if you're by default only exposed to its page
title.

~~~
etcet
Do you really think that Google are going to hide their https signals? If
anything, hiding the URL gives phishers less to use. So marlinspike
demonstrated that you can 'spoof' "<https://> and fake a secure looking
favicon. But can you spoof the browser detecting a secure connection and then
turning the page tab bright green? I don't know how they are going to do it
but I bet their positive feedback signals are going to be strong and very hard
to spoof.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"But can you spoof the browser detecting a secure connection and then turning
the page tab bright green?"_

The important part of what Marlinspike showed is that you don't have to. He
ran his setup on a Tor exit node, the users of which are presumably more
security minded than the rest of the general population, and not a single user
balked at the lack of positive feedback.

HSTS is a real solution, but not a scalable one.

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antimatter15
I have serious doubts this information is up to date. The mockup for the
interface without a URL bar was made something like a year ago, when Chrome OS
was first announced. It had an actual implementation of the said compact
navigation that was removed soon afterwards. That document existed at that
time and I think they just haven't updated it.

If I recall correctly, Compact Navigation looked like IE9, with a mini omni
box that fit on the tab row. I thought it was ugly, and the tab strip is
cramped enough already without the omnibox, navigation and certainly not
extensions.

Also, the multiple profiles thing isn't new.

As a random note, does the Chrome team have something with ponies? The mockup
shows the url google.com/ponies (just checked, 404). One of the Cr-48 hardware
versions is named Pony.

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bluesnowmonkey
> It is somewhat surprising that Google is not pursuing the sidetab navigation
> version [...]. The company said that this layout would waste space for users
> who do not use many tabs, that it only works nicely on screen layouts that
> are 1366 pixels wide and that the layout does not relate well to Chromium
> browser overall.

Yeah that's a nice list of reasons not to do the obviously right thing.

Take that very page. Its viewable area is 985px by 4701px. Even my little
1280x800 screen has huge gray bars on the left and right sides to fill up the
wasted horizontal space. I have to scroll vertically seven times to see it
all.

Do Chrome devs not use widescreen monitors? What makes them think cramming
weird, non-idiomatic UI elements into the window's precious vertical space
makes any sense at all?

That sidetab version is beautiful.

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davej
Makes a lot of sense for netbooks where screen real estate is at a premium. I
hope that if they make changes they will be user configurable though.

~~~
zrgiu
it will probably be configurable for a few versions of chrome. Probably
permanent by Chrome 20 though...

~~~
pavs
I bet chrome 20 will be out by the year end.

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baddox
That Sidetab mockup looks great. Back before I switched to Chrome from
Firefox, I used vertical tabs in Firefox, and it was awesome.

~~~
stanleydrew
You can enable it in Chrome right now with the -enable-vertical-tabs command
line flag. For reference, here is the source file where most of the switches
are laid out:

[http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_s...](http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc)

~~~
pedrokost
I find this easier: about:flags

~~~
stanleydrew
Not every flag is in there though. I wasn't aware that the vertical tabs flag
had graduated to about:flags status but now I see that it has.

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bane
Maybe they should move the unreadable mess of microtabs I have on the top of
my window to the vast swath of blank area on the left or right of my
widescreen monitor (yes, I have 30 or 40 tabs open at any one time, rendering
the top bar almost useless).

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dtran
Does Chrome send back (anonymized) data about usage? Or are there instrumented
versions of Chrome/Chromium that do do this?

I wonder what the usage numbers are for how often you focus on the URL bar and
change it within one tab. I notice in my own usage, I pretty much ALWAYS open
a NEW tab to go to a new site and never touch the URL bar, so compacting it or
hiding it behind an extra click seems like good UX design if it's backed up by
usage data.

~~~
salmonsnide
In preferences there's an option to send usage statistics and crash reports to
Google.

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Bossman
Interesting changes. Not gonna have a real opinion either way until I get to
try it first hand, though. Maybe I'll move to the dev channel when the new UI
hits there.

Reading the article, though, I'm very interested with the way they're going to
handle multiple users - mainly this:

> If a user closes three windows with three different identities and the
> reopens three windows, the windows would assume the identity of the three
> identities again, Google said.

~~~
mckoss
I agree the multi user aspect is an area that could use improvement. This
would imply that you'd be able to have a different set of cookies in each
window - something that forces many of us to use multiple browsers or
incognito mode to achieve.

One of my biggest gripes about Google's account management, is that you are
logged in automatically across all Google properties. I use multiple accounts
all the time. Just because I'm logged in to one account on Gmail, doesn't mean
I want to use the same account when I visit AdSense, or Google Checkout.

This new capability would at least allow me to work around Google's flawed
global account sign-in.

~~~
Bossman
Interesting. Never really thought about this. I have multiple Google accounts,
but never really sign in with both on any device besides my Android phone.

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kingsidharth
This will be a nice experiment. As a UI designer, I am always looking for part
of the interface that are not used much and replace them with what is used
more often - so this thing totally makes sense.

It will be interesting to see what it results into - a frustrating experience
or more vertical space and distraction free UI.

------
jackfoxy
Chrome is my primary browser, and while I applaud increasing space devoted to
content, I wish Chrome had better support for alternate search engines. My
primary searches are (in order of use) Google, Wikipedia, Amazon. By better
support I mean I don't like the way it works in the omni-box. I think the old-
fashioned way done in IE8 and FF of having a dedicated search box is much more
convenient and easier for most users to configure, but I'm open to other
alternatives. I understand IE9 has jumped on the bandwagon and dropped the
search box too.

[EDIT] My biggest beef: remembering to substitute underscore for space in
Wikipedia search terms.

~~~
tonfa
Aren't keyword search sufficient? Like "w something" to search wikipedia for
"something".

~~~
jackfoxy
OK, I take this one back, but only because wikipedia fixed the problem on
their end. If you do the Google Omni-box key-word > tab > search term it
formerly worked only with a single search term. If you tried searching for
"casey jones", for instance it broke because the omni-box only creates a url,
it doesn't use the site's native search engine. So you end up with "%20"
between the terms. Apparently wikipedia saw this problem enough times to build
in the smarts to redirect to "casey_jones".

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Wawl
I personally use firefox with pentadactyl, which by default removes the URL
bar. It was a bit akward at the beginning but it's a major gain of space
(especially in fullscreen mode) and there's nothing I could do with the URL
bar that I can't do with keybindings.

For instance, if I want to edit the current page's url, I type "y o <cmd v>"
to paste it in the status bar.

~~~
tobik
You might be interested to know that pressing "O" does the same thing as "y o
<cmd v>" ;-)

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joshz
Mid last year there was a tab option to hide the url bar, I can't remember if
only for pinned tabs or regular ones also. For some reason that got removed
and now we have separate app windows in recent releases, which in my opinion,
are somewhat annoying mostly due to tabs originating from app window being
opened in separate browser window.

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gsivil
Along the same lines I was thinking of the following alternative:

having no url bar at all but if you press let's say Ctrl+g (put whatever is
available here) the url bar appears in the center of the screen and it
disappears when you press Enter. Do you think that something like that could
make sense?

~~~
thought_alarm
Safari already does this. You can reduce the Safari UI to just a window and a
title bar; the location bar will appear automatically when you hit Command+L
or open a tab, and disappear automatically when you hit Return.

~~~
gsivil
Thanks! Sorry for rediscovering the wheel :)

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slmichalk
I think it would be neat if browsers worked more like mobile browsers, where
they are full screen by default and you press a button to make the ui appear.
I am thinking about Dolphin browser for Android specifically.

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wooptoo
They're focusing on the wrong things.

The compact UI is very confusing. The current UI is fine, don't screw with it
just to save an extra 10 pixels of vertical space.

How about freezing feature changes for 3 months and fixing bugs?

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yuhong
Reminds me of this: [http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/04/address-bar-and-sea-
of-d...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/04/address-bar-and-sea-of-
darkness.html)

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cduruk
I wrote about this at one point. Here's a link:

<http://www.quora.com/Can-Duruk/Web-Development/URL-1>

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Zaim2
I would've thought better tab management would be first priority, as nameless
mountains are really grating. Tab groups can't come quickly enough.

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slowpoison
This is probably based on the usage data the Chrome uploads to Google. People
are perhaps not directly using the URL bar that much.

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nowarninglabel
Am I the only one that after looking at the mockup tried going to
google.com/ponies and was subsequently disappointed?

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jpalomaki
If I don't have the URL bar, how can I tell the difference between a
legitimate site and phishing site?

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p858snake
If google really wanted to do something about the space, they would look
towards the download bar.

~~~
anonymoushn
You can just close that...

~~~
p858snake
Yes but the next time you download/save something it appears again (and can be
a pain if you are downloading a few things in one go) compared to Firefox
where you can hide its download manager behind the window.

As well as the height of it is over what it really needs to be, The download
bar in Chrome really shouldn't need to be any taller than the tab bar.

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davros
They'll have to pry my url from my cold dead hands!

Seriously, no always-visible url and I go back to firefox.

~~~
dwc
Then I'm sure you'll be back in FF soon enough. When they talked about ceasing
to display the protocol, I thought surely it would just be a default and I
could put it back. No such luck. I'd expect this to go the same way. It's
their way or the highway.

I'm still running Chrome, but only until I get around to switching. I won't
install it again. Not that Google cares at all what J. Random Hacker thinks.

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trezor
Looks like how tabs and location-bar is intermixed in MSIE9. Must admit I'm
not too happy about it.

