I definitely agree with the emotional feeling of using the tools being crucial to being a happy developer. I was talking to Diane Loviglio about this a few months ago and she seemed very interested in getting the User Research team involved in making this easier–e.g. by doing qualitative user studies on new developers trying to contribute to Firefox, observing the major pain points and areas of confusion they run into, and helping us figure out the best way to make developing Firefox easier, both for current contributors and future ones.

Gavin, that’s an interesting point, and the first argument I’ve seen that actually helps me understand why UX designers have implemented what they did. I’m still not sure I agree with the change–I much prefer a “graying out” of the protocol when it’s HTTP to help people learn how to read them, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist and is therefore a completely different thing from any other kind of URL, while also breaking expectations for copy/paste.

That said, I’ve heard a lot of rumblings around the Valley about how “users don’t understand URLs”, and I assumed that this was the first step in their eventual extinction. It’s good to know that we don’t want URLs to die off, but I do wonder what the ultimate answer to Ben’s question is. Part of the reason that URLs don’t work well on mobile in particular seems to be because they’re really hard to type and really hard to read in their entirety on such a small screen–so I too wonder what will replace them, and whether they’ll be as transparent and hackable as the URL.