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June 15, 2020 10:00 pm

Google Resumes Its Senseless Attack On the URL Bar, Hides Full Addresses On Chrome 85

Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name. Android Police reports: A few new feature flags have appeared in Chrome's Dev and Canary channels (V85), which modify the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar. The main flag is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name. For example, "https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5-chromebook-review/" is simply displayed as "androidpolice.com." There are two additional flags that modify this behavior. One reveals the full address once you hover over the address bar (instead of having to click it), while the other only hides the address bar once you interact with the page. An issue page on the Chromium Bug tracker has also been created for keeping track of the changes, though there aren't any additional details there. There's no public explanation yet for why Google is pressing ahead with these changes, but the company has said in the past that it believes showing the full address can make it harder to tell if the current site is legitimate. "Showing the full URL may detract from the parts of the URL that are more important to making a security decision on a webpage," Chromium software engineer Livvie Lin said in a design document earlier this year. Google has since clarified how the experiment will work and what opt-out options will be available. "We think this is an important problem area to explore because phishing and other forms of social engineering are still rampant on the web," a Chromium developer on the bug tracker for the change said, "and much research shows that browsers' current URL display patterns aren't effective defenses. We're implementing this simplified domain display experiment so that we can conduct qualitative and quantitative research to understand if it helps users identify malicious websites more accurately." It was also confirmed that Google will keep the opt-out mechanism that is already present -- an 'Always show full URLs' setting that appears when you right-click the address bar. "We plan to support this opt-out option indefinitely," the same developer said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/2wemf_oWGfQ/google-resumes-its-senseless-attack-on-the-url-bar-hides-full-addresses-on-chrome-85

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