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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>Of course, people these days have no idea what a URL or URL bar is, as it's often hidden anyway... :(

The vast majority of users have no idea what an address or address bar is, let alone a Universal Resource Locator. Hell, most users don't understand files and folders in a computing context either.

As much as I hate how iOS, Android, MacOS, and presumably even Windows these days are obfuscating the file system and nearly everything pertaining to it, I do think it's a necessary step in the right direction. Most users do not address, and as computing hardware and software engineers, designers, and nerds we have an obligation to provide computers that all users can easily understand.

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It is not a good idea to assume that users are stupid, uncurious and can’t learn. The end-state of this philosophy is that citizen can’t get informed and can’t vote properly, we need to tell them who to vote for, and do it instead of them.

What differenciated the Middle Ages from the Enlightenment periods is the understanding that people aren’t that stupid, we don’t have to hide the Bible behind Latin, we can translate it to the local language and they’ll learn by themselves instead of going through clercs, and the same goes for law, physics, sciences and philosophy.

And we’re much better off with populaces able to make decisions for themselves (ie copy from the URL and drop one letter by mistake) than dumbing down everything to have control over them.

But... people might come to conclusions I don't like! Or agree with!!

Knowing how to navigate to websites directly seems important for laypeople to understand.

There is point where dumbing down technology doesn't make it meaningfully more accessible but just serves to harm users. Hiding the URL bar is past that point.

I'm a computer nerd, I just use Google to look up and go to most websites I want these days.

Why? Because I'm not confident I can type their URLs properly and any typos are a one-way ticket to Scam City. Chances are reasonable Google has the correct website URL. Bookmarks, you say? Can't be arsed.

Between inconvenience, unintuitiveness, and "I ain't got time for this" mentality it's no surprise why file system structures are obfuscated away.

>URLs properly and any typos are a one-way ticket to Scam City. Chances are reasonable Google has the correct website

googles no1 spot has become scam city hundreds of times for big namens just this year alone

>Bookmarks, you say? Can't be arsed.

in the time you complained about this problem of your own creation you could habe bookmarked your top 20-50 visited sites.

off topic but i see more and more "I'm too lazy to do x" where the solution would be easier than just being "lazy"

Look boy, my time only becomes ever more valuable as I age. I literally ain't got time for 'puter nonsense anymore.

Did I really type in amazon.com correctly? Not amazn.com? amazon.cm? Or some other stupid typo that will send me straight to Scam City?

In that time I could have gone to Google (which is my browser home page), typed in something vaguely resembling "amazon", and the first or second link will be amazon.com 99% of the time.

I ain't got time.

What about almost any other website? Google aggressively abstracts away search terms and very often gives you something irrelevant.

Same, shaking my head. Your “users” are full grown adults with full time jobs and kids. They dont have time to understand nothing. iOS model of simplifying everything is far more intuitive and better.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for a dev-switch which would enable scripting and open up everything in OSes. But tell me how you are gonna do that without scammers telling grandmas “Copy this thing to here, yeah…”. Currently the dev switch is e.g. a Mac and $99/year, for iOS.

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