Google Inc. In the Chromium codebase, on which Chrome 85 will be based, a change is being implemented by default to hide path elements and query parameters in the address bar. Only the website's domain will remain visible, while the full URL can be viewed after clicking on the address bar.
The change is planned to be gradually rolled out to users through experimental enablements covering a small percentage of users. These experiments will help determine how well hiding the URL meets the company's expectations, allow adjustments based on user feedback, and assess the effectiveness of the change in terms of phishing protection. In Chrome 85, the option "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" will appear on the about:flags page, allowing users to enable or disable URL hiding.
The change affects both mobile and desktop versions of the browser. Several options are available for desktop versions. The first option will be available in the context menu and will allow users to revert to the old behavior of always showing the full URL. The second option, currently proposed only in the about:flags section, will allow the full URL to be displayed when hovering over the address bar (without needing to click). The third option will show the full URL immediately after opening, but after interaction with the page (scrolling, clicks, key presses), it will switch to showing only the domain.
The motivation for the change is to protect users from phishing schemes that manipulate URL parameters—malicious actors exploit users' inattention to create the illusion of visiting another website and engage in fraudulent activities (while such substitutions may be obvious to technically savvy users, unwary individuals can easily fall for these simple manipulations).
It should be noted that since 2018, Google has been promoting In an effort to move away from showing traditional URLs in the address bar, it is argued that regular users find URLs difficult to understand, read, and do not immediately grasp which parts of the address are trustworthy. Starting with Chrome 76, the address bar has been defaulted to show links without 'https://', 'http://', and 'www.', and now it's time to trim down the informative part of the URL.
According to Google, users should clearly see which website they are interacting with in the address bar and whether it can be trusted (the compromise option of more distinctly highlighting the domain and displaying query parameters in a lighter/smaller font seems not to be considered). There is also mention of confusion when filling out URLs while working with interactive web applications like Gmail. Initially, during the discussion of the initiative, some users had the , that removing the display of the full URL is advantageous for promoting the (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
With AMP, pages are delivered to the user not directly, but through Google's infrastructure, which leads to the display of (https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/example.com) in the address bar and often causes confusion among users. Moving away from displaying URLs will hide the AMP Cache domain and create the illusion of a direct visit to the main site. Such hiding is already implemented in Chrome for Android but is not applied to desktop systems. Hiding URLs can also be beneficial when distributing web applications through the (SXG) mechanism, designed to facilitate the hosting of verified copies of web pages on other sites.
Source: opennet.ru
