Google will stop using ‘simplified’ URLs in the address bars of its Chrome and Chromium browsers. The company makes this known in the Chromium bug tracker. According to the company, that experiment has not led to demonstrably better security.
Google started an experiment for simplified URLs in June 2020. The address bar in the Chrome browser would therefore only show the base domain name. Anything that comes after a tld like ‘.com’ or ‘.pk’ was not shown in the address bar. An url like https://techwarrant.com/google-will-show-full-urls-in-chrome-browser-again would thus be shown in the url bar of Chrome as techwarrant.com.
The company hoped this would make browsing more secure. With only a main domain in the address bar, it would be easier to spot phishing websites, for example, but according to Google, this turned out not to be the case. “This experiment didn’t lead to demonstrably better security, so we’re not going to release it,” a Google employee wrote in the Chromium bug tracker. This removes ‘simplified domains’ from Chrome’s codebase.
According to Ghacks, the change will not affect the removal of some prefixes, such as “https://” or “www.” Such things will remain hidden in the url bar of Chrome.