An option to show the full website's address and protocol
Categories
(Fenix :: Toolbar, enhancement)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: jonalmeida, Unassigned)
Details
From github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12811.
What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?
Fenix should display the full URLs including protocol (http://, https://, etc.) and "www" (When applicable) in it's address bar. Ideally, it would do so by default, but it seems like a user option would be a reasonable compromise if no consensus can be reached.
How do you know that this problem exists today? Why is this important?
People have talked about this issue and shown screenshots of Fenix elsewhere online.
It is important to show full URLs with protocols for several reasons.
The first reason, but least common issue is that https://www.example.com and https://example.com do not necessarily lead to the same page. They usually do, but not always. So, anything that does not show the www as a matter of course is potentially introducing an inaccuracy into the information flow to the user.
However, more so than that, it is important to keep full user visible URLs to preserve an open Internet accessible directly by all with a simple DNS lookup that doesn't limit the end user's ability to see what is really going on and concentrate power in the hands of search engines and web sites. The removal of protocols and www are a step in a potential progression that Google has talked about having continue until it doesn't show anything except the domain name, making "https://www.example.com/example/example.html" and every other unique page within the domain simply "example.com". Beyond that, we could just wind up with "example".
Mozilla's principles lead one to believe that they want to preserve an open Internet that empowers users to view as much information as they want and to explore the web whichever way they want to explore it with or without search engines, directly or via links, with Google or with DuckDuckGo, with Chrome or with Firefox, and so on and so forth.
Firefox has an opportunity here to be a strong counterweight to Chrome's attempt to lead the Internet into being essentially, from the user side, a series of "AOL keywords" and to be a stronger browser for people who want a deeper dive into the web browsing experience than what Chrome and Chromium-based browsers can offer them.
We also want to keep the door open to new protocols and to the revival of old protocols and for the user to be able to see those protocols and differentiate pages using them from existing protocols in their minds, which means we have to keep the idea of protocols alive in the minds of users and keep them in front of them even if the present era uses relatively few protocols. If eventually a different protocol arises that is better for some purposes than others, and a decision is made to support that alone with existing protocols, we need users to understand that "https://www.example.com" is different from "example://www.example.com" so the user can make informed choices and guard against phishing attempts.
Moreover, ultimately, hiding information from the URL is going to lead to AMP pages hosted by Google being indistinguishable from pages hosted on independent servers.
It is thus important to keep full URL information visible to the user- ideally by default, but as an option if default is not considered realistic for other reasons.
Having this feature will also help Fennec users who currently choose to have their browser display the protocol and URL transition to Fenix when the time comes. Going from Fennec to Fenix is going to be a dramatic change in general for some users, and feature parity, I would imagine, along with being a goal of the development team in general, will also reduce day one transition shock so that fewer people abandon the web browser when the change comes to the release channel. Users should feel that instead of a change to Fenix limiting them, that it allows them to everything they could do with Fennec and more.
Flagship phones often have mid-level PC specs in some areas now. 8 GB or 12 GBs of RAM is not uncommon, for instance. Screen size is increasing dramatically. Most browsers are still unnecessarily limited compared to desktop browsers. Firefox should be expanding rather than contracting what it can do on these devices. For many people now, a phone serves as their most used or only Internet capable device, and when features disappear from their phone's browser, that really does limit what they can do on the Internet in general in important ways.
A phone is no longer just a cut down quick reference-things-on-the-go type of device. People curl up with their phones for hours upon hours a day. When we reduce the information flow, user options, and the control that users have on their phones in ways that are not strictly required for useability, we are in a very real way limiting what the Internet and specifically the web can be for a lot of users.
Who will benefit from it?
Users. The Internet. Any company not named Google.
┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task
Change performed by the Move to Bugzilla add-on.
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Updated•2 years ago
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Comment 1•3 months ago
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I wonderful way of being a counterpoint would be to offer a built-in URL explainer, that would show the various parts that make up a URL with different colours and offer to interactively explain them. You know, empower the user, like the old Lightbeam / Collusion extension did.
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Comment 2•3 months ago
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git@axelsimon.net, I wholeheartedly agree. We've seen what even basic syntax highlighting and explanation capabilities in IDE have provided to novice developers. I see no reason why it wouldn't be even more effective for novice users.
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