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0 pointseridius6y ago0 comments

It's unreasonable because it violates user expectations. One click already makes the field editable and selects the text, having a second click change the text has no precedent whatsoever. It's also confusing because this means that clicking to position the insertion point suddenly moves the text out from under where you clicked (thankfully it does still place the insertion point at the right location, but that location is no longer where you're looking and pointing).

There's also just no reason for this. It's unnecessary overhead to showing the full URL and there's no benefit.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

Veedrac6y ago· 2 in thread

The point is that the most common thing people do when clicking the URL is typing something else in the search bar, and the second most is copying the URL. In both cases, having the URL change is a problem, because this includes people who don't know what the http:// means or what a subdomain is, and don't immediately understand when a URL is the same as another. Your extra click saves my mother, and millions like her, much more confusion than the click costs you.

You probably mostly know technically fluent people, and think ‘my mother’ is a euphemism, but it's not. If we can get to a world where she can see an unfakeable padlock and read ‘facebook.com’, rather than remember whether it was ‘https:’ or ‘https.’ in the URL bar, and which parts of the string of letters to skip, we've made her life less hostile.

The corresponding problem you're complaining about is incredibly trivial in comparison. If you're actually editing the URL, you see the whole URL. If you need to know these implementation details, they're vastly easier to find than, say, HTTP headers.

eridiusOP6y ago

If you type something in the bar it doesn't matter what it shows.

If you copy the URL, the fact that what you copy is literally different than what you're looking at is confusing. You copied "example.com", so why does the clipboard now contain "http://www.example.com/"?

> If we can get to a world where she can see an unfakeable padlock and read ‘facebook.com’, rather than remember whether it was ‘https:’ or ‘https.’ in the URL bar, and which parts of the string of letters to skip, we've made her life less hostile.

Whether the URL bar shows "https" or a padlock has nothing at all to do with the unnecessary confusion inherent in Chrome requiring a second click on the URL bar to reveal the full URL.

Nothing in your comment even begins to explain the benefit in presenting a fully-editable text field that allegedly shows the URL, except it's still hiding information that is only revealed once you try and perform another text editing action. If someone looks at the URL bar and sees "example.com", and they click on it and it immediately turns into "https://www.example.com", that doesn't harm them in any way. In fact, that's exactly how mobile browsers such as iOS Safari have worked for years and nobody's complained. Chrome is deliberately doing something different than all precedent and there's no obvious reason for this beyond their desire to be unique.

Veedrac6y ago

I gave a straightforward argument: it keeps these complexities away from people who don't understand them as much as reasonably possible, while still leaving them within trivial reach when they are necessary. If you don't like the argument, whatever, but acting like Chrome is making this a double click instead of a single click because of some kind of differentiation strategy or ego or whatever is just silly.

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