2014-05-06

Death of the URL? Death of Direct Navigation?

A lot of misinformation out there in domain name land -- the latest is that somehow Apple and Google are intentionally trying to kill direct navigation in the browser. Fact: Google and Apple are trying to make the internet more secure by preventing criminals from hijacking your passwords, credentials, and browsing on the internet--NOT inhibiting your intentional direct navigation to ___.com or ___.newgTLD:

Improving the URL bar - JakeArchibald.com: "iOS [Apple] has hidden the pathname of URLs for some time now, but recently Chrome Canary introduced something similar behind a flag....No, this isn't URL death. The URL is the share button of the web, and it does that better than any other platform. Linkability and shareability is key to the web, we must never lose that, and these changes do not lose that. The URL is still accessible in iOS by tapping the URL bar, or in the Canary experiment by clicking the origin chip or hitting ⌘-L. Well-designed URLs are more aesthetically pleasing to share, so the requirement for meaningful URLs doesn't go away. To the average user, the URL is noise. It's a mix of protocol, origin, and path. It's a terminal command, echoing it back to the user is weak UI. We should focus on the security of the URL, without harming shareability..." or navigation.






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