> There has also been a push by Google and others lately to "dumb down" the url bar to hide the full address from users. Not sure why but I assume the justification would be some misguided attempt at making it look nicer while the real reason is somehow ad related.
Suggesting Google might do anything without ad-related motives is probably too generous, but I've always thought that this was an optimisation in the sense that it's built on optimism: when everything's working well, most of what's in the URL bar is irrelevant. So the bar is built towards working well in the best case, at the expense of becoming much less useful in the worse (and probably more common) case.
Hiding/obscuring details from the URL bar seems like much less of a big deal if the goal is to rehost someone else's content. The value statement of the URL goes down a lot in that case, and the push to drive users away from it starts to make sense.
Either which way, I still hate it - The only non-work related ticket I've put in for chromium was a request for an option to disable this behavior entirely.
Safari has been doing this for years. The justification is partly because it makes the domain more obvious, especially on a mobile device where you have limited screen width. https://www.netflix.com.evilcorp.com would simply show up as evilcorp.com if only the domain is shown.
Suggesting Google might do anything without ad-related motives is probably too generous, but I've always thought that this was an optimisation in the sense that it's built on optimism: when everything's working well, most of what's in the URL bar is irrelevant. So the bar is built towards working well in the best case, at the expense of becoming much less useful in the worse (and probably more common) case.