Google Chrome revives the project to hide URLs in the browser

In early 2014, Google seemed to want to make a change in the behavior of your address bar that can be used both to search the web, to enter a URL as well as to access your browser configuration page.

Since then, Google let us know that it doesn't like the address bar of the browser or the way in which the domains are displayed on it and that is why I take action on the matter.

The change I was trying to make was to hide the URL, function that in Chrome Canary build 36, it was possible to activate. When the user navigates within the different sections of a site, only the name of the site will be displayed in the address bar.

One of the objectives behind this maneuver was to provide a tool against phishing attacks. Where one of the keys to the success of your attacks lies in persuading your victim to go to a trustworthy site.

This did not take placeBecause a lot of people still objected, opinions were quite divided, even within the Chrome team.

Despite the suspension of the project, the company simply sent it to a trunk where it could be retaken later.

So it was, A few years later (currently), the company returned with renewed enthusiasm for their project.

And is that various developers noticed that various options appeared within the browser settings page, where new functions are shown on Chrome's Dev and Canary channels (V85), which change the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar.

The main configuration is called «Omnibox UI»Which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name.

Besides that they found that there are two additional indicators They change this behavior, and a problem page has also been created in the Chromium bug tracker to track the changes, although there are no additional details there.

One reveals the full address once you hover over the bar address (instead of clicking on it), while the other only hides the address bar once it interacts with the page. 

There is still no public explanation for why Google decided to make these changes now, but the company has said in the past that it thought displaying the full address could make it more difficult to tell if the current site was legitimate.

"Displaying the full URL can corrupt parts of the URL that are most important for making a security decision on a web page," said Livvie Lin, a software engineer at Chromium, in an earlier design document. 

However, it should also be considered that making the web address less important, like this feature, benefits Google as a business.

Google's goal with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and similar technologies is to keep users on Google's hosted content as much as possible and Chrome for Android is already changing the address bar on AMP pages to hide that.

This is undoubtedly quite a significant change. of what users are used to seeing when browsing with Chrome on a desktop computer.

Since currently Chrome shows most of the URL path of a web page. Although it hides the prefixes like 'http, https' and 'www'.

Soon, that will be further boiled down to just showing the domain name and domain extension.

Finally, for those interested in knowing the change, you can try Google's web browser preview versions, you can download Chrome Dev and Chrome Canary.

If you want to know more about it, you can check the original note in the following link.

Source: https://www.androidpolice.com


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  1.   01101001b said

    “The change I wanted to make was to hide the URL […] When the user navigated within the different sections of a site, only the name of the site would be shown in the address bar.

    One of the goals behind this maneuver was to provide a tool against phishing attacks. "

    Sparkly. As coherent as advocating for a criminal to cook you with bullets and maintain that that is positive, because by doing so he will run out of bullets, which undoubtedly contributes to your safety.

    If the "survival" of the fittest is true, clearly humanity will disappear in less than 2 decades ...