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Web browsing has changed a lot over the years. There's no more home button, we browse with tabs instead of opening a new window every time,

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and a Geocities page with lots and lots of animated gifs is no longer the pinnacle of cool.

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But one thing that stuck around is the venerable address bar that shows you exactly where you are

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on the wild west that is the internet. However, Google has been making headlines recently due to reports that they're considering

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fundamentally changing the address bar by showing only the domain of the site that you're on.

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So instead of reddit.com followed by a bunch of slashes and texts showing exactly what thread

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or subreddit you're visiting, you'll only see reddit.com.

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How does that make any sense? I mean isn't this kind of like ripping the numbers off the front of your house and all

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you have to go by is the street sign on the corner? Well one big thing Google is concerned about is security.

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You see phishing attacks where users are directed to a fake page that looks like the real deal

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are a very common way that attackers fool people into giving up personal information.

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And since some phishing pages look very legitimate, one of the few ways to tell that you're not on

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the correct website is to look at the URL in the address bar, specifically the domain,

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as attackers can easily tinker with the rest of the URL to make a page look real.

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Spoofing a domain on the other hand, that's much harder. So the idea is that by only showing the domain it will be much easier for a user to tell that

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they're connected to an attacker instead of their bank or email since they don't have to

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pick through a lengthy URL to figure it out. Remember not everyone knows which are the important parts of the URL.

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Google has actually already been experimenting with cleaning up the address bar in different ways.

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It's been standard for a while now for the address bar to leave out the scheme,

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which is the part at the beginning that either says HTTP or HTTPS.

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Instead, Chrome uses a little padlock to indicate that the page uses the more secure

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HTTPS protocol and gives a warning when unencrypted HTTP is in use instead.

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And if you're browsing the web on a mobile device, many pages use Google's Accelerated

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Mobile Pages Program or AMP, which you can learn more about up here.

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These are pages that have been optimized for mobile so that they will load faster.

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And notably, these pages are actually hosted by Google.

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But the domain that you see in your address bar is the domain of whatever the original site is,

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so as not to confuse the user. So they've actually been chipping away at the traditional address bar for some time.

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Of course, there's predictably been a fair amount of backlash to these proposed changes.

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Critics are saying it's not exactly that difficult to just scroll over and see what the

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domain is if there's a concern about phishing. And hiding URLs has the potential to make the internet less decentralized

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and transparent, since the idea of the individual URL would become more irrelevant

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as we instead rely on search engines more and more to get us to the page that we need.

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And hey, wait a second. Doesn't Google happen to run the most popular search engine in the world?

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What a coinkydink. Before we get too cynical about the changes,

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you'll still be able to show the whole URL by just clicking on or hovering over the address bar.

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And it's not fully rolled out yet. Currently, the hide the URL feature is only present as a flag in pre-release versions of Chrome.

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So that's a hidden setting that you get to by typing this address into your browser.

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And besides, if the feature does become standard, Google has already confirmed that it'll be easy to change it back.

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So you can put the pitchforks away for now.