[wyattpeak]

Pure speculation, but maybe because most of the commentary on this was coming from developers.

I don't have an iPhone anymore but used to, and it was no problem that I only saw the domain, because on my phone I rarely cared about the specific address. When I'm working it's a bitch because quickly knowing the full address is useful all the time, and even at home much the same because I'm used to interacting heavily with my address bar.

I'd imagine that most people, even on their laptops, are closer to the former situation, so it's not hard for it to have relatively widespread support.

[plorkyeran]

On a phone there simply isn't space to display much more than the domain name. Picking some subset of the URL to display is unavoidable, and the domain name usually going to be a better subset than the obvious other options of the start or the end of the URL. As such I see nothing wrong with it there. On desktops you do typically have enough space to show the full URL, so I dislike it showing only the domain name.

[spurgu]

As a user it's often also helpful to understand the context of what you're reading (as long as the site has a descriptive URL structure) - is this a blog post, featured article, sponsored article, when was it written.... a good URL conveys a lot of useful information and hiding this seems highly counterproductive.

I am also very much against hiding "www.", but that's mostly from a developer/devops perspective. https/http can be hidden behind an icon, that's fine since it's a binary option, but that's as far as I'd go in accepting stripping information from URL's.

[exporectomy]

That's the kind of usage that only happens because it's available. No matter what internal information is presented to people, some will find a way of using that. But part of designing software is to curate what information to show the user, not dump an arbitrary pile of cryptic internal details on them.

URLs are mostly not fit for human consumption and don't even reliably show you what page you're on. They're a stinky skidmark on the otherwise human-accessible web.

I hope we can eventually have two clearly distinct parts to URLS - a simple domain name without www. or https:// and clearly separate, a human-readable name for the page without internal implementation details like filename extensions and symbols. Some sites are pretty close to this, New York Times is easily understandable but still filled with slashes and a redundant extension. Eg: "nytimes.com/2021/06/10/us/politics/justice-department-leaks-trump-administration.html". Hacker News is too but has a human-unfriendly "item?id=" before the (good, imo) incrementing decimal integer, not hex, not random, not padded ID number.

[wyattpeak]

I'm 100% with you, but I know plenty of fairly computer-literate people who wouldn't know how to interpret a URL, and wouldn't know what to do with that information if they did.

I don't know how those two stances, or the positions between them, break down across the population, but at minimum it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it leans towards not understanding or caring.

[rusk]

Who is going to advocate for users if not developers? It’s like giving out that civil rights lawyers are lawyers so why is their work relevant to ordinary citizens

[wyattpeak]

How is this not advocating for users? They tested the idea based on a metric they hoped would improve among users, found it didn't work, and so left it as is.

That the comments about it mostly come from developers or similarly tech-literate people is neither here nor there, comments are inherently personal. When I post on a forum about a feature, I'm generally presenting only my own opinion. When I'm implementing a feature, I'm generally basing it on the opinions of users, as best I can gather them.

[rusk]

Yeah and they came to the same conclusion as “the cranky developers” had been moaning about all along. Fancy that.