In September, members of Google’s Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren’t actually advocating a change to the web’s underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you’re looking at, so that you don’t have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has sprung up around them. In a talk at the Bay Area Enigma security conference on Tuesday, Chrome usable security lead Emily Stark is wading into the controversy, detailing Google’s first steps toward more robust website identity.
I don’t know if Google’s proposed steps are any good, but I do like it that at least some people are not afraid to challenge the status quo. Things can always be better, and holding on to the past because “it’s always been that way” is a terrible argument.
Google controls the web with chrome. Google needs websites to be harder to find to force search.
This is the type of thing that’s apt to penalize advanced users while making things “easier” for regular users by selling off some freedoms most don’t realize that they have. With a browser currently one can get to any site by directly typing a known URL, even if that URL is to an intranet resource or not yet indexed. Without a direct interface to URLs that power is lost. The Web browser in Google Glass is a pretty good example of something partway there now; it can be really challenging to get to something that isn’t already in Google’s index, because the voice interface is going to auto-correct to something that Google thinks is popular and it wants to do a search for the page rather than a direct access of the page.
Oh yeah, I like it too when:
– demonstrably there is a deep knowledge of the flaws in current situation that can be better handled and a proper solution is proposed, preferably with its shortcomings also disclosed. There is nothing like that on the article;
– the group asking for change does not carry a veiled interest on the proposed solution.
acobar,
+1
I do have concern that some of the motivation to do it is to give google even more power over the web.
As for different approaches, it would have been interesting to see how gopher could have evolved had the university of minnesota not sought to charge licensing fees, which effectively killed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
Gopher would be wonderful to check things on libraries all around the world but to handle the very unstructured web content and organization we have today … I’m not sure.
acobar,
Well two things to consider:
1. The internet could have evolved to be more structured.
2. Gopher could have evolved to be more flexible.
I’m thinking of killer applications like ebay and youtube here. It wouldn’t necessarily be bad, just different.
And changing something just because its old is also a terrible argument.
It’s not “always been that way” – anyone remember AOL keywords? there’s beeen many other ways to do things tried. URLs are what they are because they succictly express a lot of information. The protocol, optionally the port, the hostname, and the resource on that host (which may or may not represent a folder tree depending on the protocol).
Nothing in that’s changed. We still have a need to express all that information. Most of the “security” issues they’re complaining about are actually due to later changes for “user friendliness” introduced to the system like directly representing internationalized hostnames instead of the underlying punycode.
Google is kidding itself if it thinks that my changing things more, and obscuring more information, it’s actually making things safer in the long run.
The URL is important. The more you hide it the more you’re encouraging user ignorance. User ignorance is the ultimate worst thing for security and safety.
The1stImmortal,
+1
I hadn’t made the connection, but you’re right. I remember businesses would actually buy keywords on AOL and promote them in their advertising. I don’t know if people outside of america would know about it though.
Any proposal by google needs to be approached very cautiously because I doubt their intentions are totally innocent. Changes to the way users access websites from the browser could increase their role as gatekeepers to the web. This should not be taken lightly considering that google’s marketshare is 90% and chrome’s marketshare is 70% and increasing.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx
https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
Say they do demote the URLs in chrome and replace them with google assigned identifiers/data. By deprecating urls in favor of new google based navigation controls, google could technically control the user experience even beyond google’s own websites, Website owners who disagree might be given a way to opt-out of google’s url replacement, but google could adjust pagerank to favor the websites that agree to their new curated navigation. Realistically most website owners simply couldn’t afford to say no due to google’s gigantic userbase. In this way, google could realistically & effectively “AOLify” the whole web.
“AOLified” resource/business locators is what we largely have on Facebook, how many people reach them; perhaps that’s the perceived threat to its search engine that Google wants to combat here…