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Google Resumes its Senseless Attack on the URL Bar, Hides Full Addresses on Chrome 85

posted by chromas on Monday June 15 2020, @10:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the AOL dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/12/google-resumes-its-senseless-attack-on-the-url-bar-hides-full-addresses-on-chrome-canary/

Google has tried on and off for years to hide full URLs in Chrome's address bar, because apparently long web addresses are scary and evil. Despite the public backlash that came after every previous attempt, Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name.

A few new feature flags have appeared in Chrome's Dev and Canary channels (V85), which modify the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar. The main flag is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name. For example, "https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5-chromebook-review/" is simply displayed as "androidpolice.com."

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday June 15 2020, @11:26AM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Monday June 15 2020, @11:26AM (#1008094)

    They don't appear to be back us this claim of url:s being scarey and evil except by them saying so -- which doesn't really make it so.

    Further down they take another turn and apparently now showing the full url is a security risk since it, according to Google devs, detracts from the important aspects of the url.

    nicepage.com vs nicepage.com/blahblah/evilhackpagestealingyourstuff/ -- I'm fairly sure I would be more concerned about the latter then the first. So I'm not really buying their excuses or explanations here unless they can somehow back it up with some actual data.

    Even if it's just cosmetic it doesn't really make any sense to me, apparently you can bring back the full url by just clicking on the url:bar or mousing-over-it. That is to say those are options, that may or may not be active.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @02:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @02:19PM (#1008133)

    FOR NOW.

    They did this with the protocol. Now you cannot see http/s in the urlbar.

    They will remove the url flags in the future, based on what they have done in the past.