On Google’s War on Address Bar in Browser
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Google has been fighting a war of attrition for years with the browser’s Address Bar. In its newest attempt, Chrome version 85 hides all parts of web address except the domain name in Chrome Omnibox.
Google is not alone in the attempts to dumb down the address bar. Explorer in Windows 10 shows C:\Users\John\Downloads as This PC > Downloads in the address bar. Apple has been doing this on Safari. macOS doesn’t even have an address bar in Finder.
In a design document published earlier by a Google employee, one of the goals for elision was stated as
Showing the full URL may detract from the parts of the URL that are more important to making a security decision on a webpage. However, this risk is mitigated in that we expect that the users who opt in to this setting are power users who understand URLs (and in such cases, potentially improve security).
Google also has an agenda of muddling up the difference between Google-hosted AMP pages and “regular” pages.
Google’s attack on Address Bar is probably coming from a good place. However, if Google’s goal is to help detect fraudulent sites (like google.com.hacker.site), it is more useful to show the domain name more prominently, rather than throwing the query string baby with the URL bathwater. It’s a dumbing down of the internet, in an attempt to help the average user, but it won’t work and it is just going to make life harder for those who know a bit more than average.
