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. And a GeoCities
page with lots and lots of animated GIFs is no longer the pinnacle of cool. But
one thing that stuck around is the venerable address bar that shows you
exactly where you are on the wild west
that is the internet. However, Google has been making headlines recently due
to reports that they're considering fundamentally changing the address bar
by showing only the domain of the site that you're on. So instead of reddit.com
followed by a bunch of slashes and text showing exactly what thread or subreddit
you're visiting, you'll only see reddit.com. 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 you have to go by is the street sign on the corner? Well, one
big thing Google is concerned about is security. You see phishing attacks,
where users are directed to a fake page that looks like the real deal, are a
very common way that attackers fool people into giving up personal
information. And since some phishing pages look very legitimate, one of the
few ways to tell that you're not on the correct website is to look at the URL in
the address bar, specifically the domain, as attackers can easily tinker
with the rest of the URL to make a page look real. 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 they're connected to an
attacker instead of their bank or email, since they don't have to pick through a
lengthy URL to figure it out. Remember, not everyone knows which are the
important parts of the URL. Google has
actually already been experimenting with cleaning up the address bar in different
ways. It's been standard for a while now for the address bar to leave out the
scheme, which is the part at the beginning that either says HTTP or
HTTPS. Instead, Chrome uses a little
padlock to indicate that the page uses the more secure HTTPS protocol and gives
a warning when unencrypted HTTP is in use instead. And if you're browsing the
web on a mobile device, many pages use Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages
program or AMP, which you can learn more about up here.
These are pages that have been optimized for mobile so that they will load
faster. And notably, these pages are actually hosted by Google. But the
domain that you see in your address bar is the domain of whatever the original
site is, so as not to confuse the user. So they've actually been chipping away
at the traditional address bar for some time.
Of course, there's predictably been a fair amount of backlash to these
proposed changes. Critics are saying it's not exactly that difficult to just
scroll over and see what the domain is if there's a concern about phishing. And
hiding URLs has the potential to make the internet less decentralized and
transparent, since the idea of the individual URL would become more
irrelevant as we instead rely on search engines more and more to get us to the
page that we need. And hey, wait a second. Doesn't Google happen to run the
most popular search engine in the world? What a coinkidink. Before we get too
cynical about the changes, you'll still be able to show the whole URL by just
clicking on or hovering over the address bar. 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. So that's a hidden setting that you get to by typing this
address into your browser. And besides, if the feature does become
standard, Google has already confirmed that it'll be easy to change it back. So
you can put the pitchforks away for now.
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