Chrome intends to switch to showing only the domain in the address bar

Google company has added to the Chromium codebase upon which the release of Chrome 85 will be built, a change that disables the display of path elements and query parameters in the address bar by default. Only the domain of the site will remain visible, and the full URL can be seen after clicking on the address bar.

The change is planned to be rolled out to users gradually during pilot deployments covering a small percentage of users. These experiments will allow us to understand how URL hiding meets the company's expectations, will provide an opportunity to adjust the implementation taking into account the wishes of users, and show whether the change in the area of ​​​​phishing protection is effective. In Chrome 85, the "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" option will appear on the about:flags page, with which you can enable or disable URL hiding.

The change affects both mobile and desktop versions of the browser. There are several options for desktop versions. The first option will be available in the context menu and will allow you to revert to the old behavior and always show the full URL. The second, which is only offered in the about:flags section so far, will enable the display of the full URL when hovering the mouse over the address bar (display without the need for a click). The third one will allow showing the full URL immediately after opening, but after the start of interaction with the page (scrolling, clicking, pressing keys), go to a shortened display of the domain.

The motive for the change is the desire to protect users from phishing that manipulates parameters in the URL - attackers use the inattention of users to create the appearance of opening another site and commit fraudulent actions manipulations).

Recall that since 2018, Google has been promoting the initiative to avoid showing the traditional URL in the address bar, insisting that the URL is difficult for normal users to understand, hard to read, and not immediately clear which parts of the address are trustworthy. Starting with Chrome 76, the address bar was changed by default to display links without "https://", "http://" and "www.", now it's the turn of trimming the informative part of the URL.

According to Google, in the address bar, the user should clearly see which site he interacts with and whether he can be trusted (for some reason, a compromise option with a more explicit selection of the domain and the display of query parameters in a lighter / smaller font is not considered). Also mentioned is a URL padding confusion when working with interactive web applications such as Gmail. At the initial discussion of the initiative, some users were expressed assumptionthat getting rid of showing the full URL is beneficial for technology advancement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

With AMP, pages are served to the user not directly, but through the Google infrastructure, which leads to display in the address bar another domain (https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/example.com) and often causes user confusion. Avoiding displaying the URL will hide the AMP Cache domain and give the illusion of direct access to the main site. Hiding is already done in Chrome for Android, but not on desktop. URL hiding can also be useful when distributing web applications using the Signed HTTP Exchanges (SXG), designed to organize the placement of verified copies of web pages on other sites.

Source: opennet.ru