Google Is Serious, Chrome 13 Hides URL Bar 417
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."
Phishing trip (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a guaranteed fraud magnet.
Re:To cluttered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, Really, Really Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:And all for what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not good enough. When I'm developing a site, I need the URL so I can figure out whether things are working or not. And even when browsing for fun, I want the URL bar so I can modify it.
On most finance sites, it's faster for me to simply change the "XYZ" in the "&symbol=XYZ" part of the URL than it is to enter it into some search box. On Slashdot, I can just paste &no_d2=1 into the end of a URL. On Fark, I just paste &cpp=1 to get one-page-per-thread view.
Re:I will miss the bar (Score:4, Insightful)
What bothered me is Chrome's removal of the bookmars bar. Now it is hidden under the settings menu. I should not have to do this each time I want to go to a bookmark. Worse, they removed the Google search engine bar at the top of the screen. Now I have to hit delete on an url and type whatever I want or click new tab and then type it. Under IE 9 and Firefox I just type in the search bar.
Seriously Google, you are not saving space by removing these.
"I am starting to dislike progress. I need a drink."
I hear you. I had the unfortunate experience with using Fedora 15 with Gnome-shell last night. I just wiped the virtual partition and am installing Fedora 14 with Gnome 2.x for my unix web development. Sure I only have Postgresql 8.x and not 9.0.3 but I keep my sanity in the process.
All I have to say is thank god for competition with 2 other good browsers. IE 9 actually doesn't suck! It is stunning and fast and in the same league as Firefox 4 and Chrome 10. Competition is a beautiful thing. Issue I have is that Firefox 4 does not accelerate video on Linux so if you have Ubuntu or Fedora you are stuck with Chrome if you want a semi good browsing experience which is annoying.
Re:And all for what? (Score:4, Insightful)
And all this is being done for what? To give me 50 pixels? Whoop-dee-doo.
From Google's standpoint, lack of an address bar can steer more people back to Google for searches.
From a user's point of view... Well, I use the address bar... But about 80% of my users do not. Even if I give them a web address, they'll go to Google/Yahoo/Bing/whatever and type it in there. So it wouldn't be much of a change for them.
Re:And all for what? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's a bad idea. I happen to like having my URL bar visible, so I can see where I am, make sure I'm not at some phishing site, so I can quickly type in a new address, so I can can copy&paste my current URL into an email and send to someone, etc.
As an option for netbooks, that's fine, but that's nothing new either. Firefox has always had the option of disabling the "navigation toolbar" if you wanted more screen space. But netbooks are a tiny, tiny minority anyway, so settings optimal for them shouldn't be forced on everyone else by default. Netbooks seem to be dying out anyway, and they seem to have just been a short-lived fad that got supplanted by the iPad.