Google is constantly looking for new ways to improve and simplify your web browser. For this, the company launches all kinds of experiments, using activated or experimental functions within the “flags”, to find the ones that best fulfill their purpose. But not all the features that Google implements in your browser come to fruition. And one of the last, which allowed to simplify the URLs to improve security, is going to disappear very soon.
In mid-2020, the company announced a feature, which was not to everyone’s liking, but with which it intended to improve user security: simplify website URLs. What this new feature did was, instead of showing the full URL of a website, it was showing only the main directory . For example, for this news, whose URL is “https://itigic.com/google-chrome-removes-simplified-urls-and-displays-them-in-full/ens in a new tab)“, Chrome would only show “itigic.com” in the address bar.
Google will show the full URLs again
As Google has published in the Chromium bug list, this feature has not worked as its developers expected. Minimizing the URL in the address bar has not improved the security of users or protected them against all kinds of threats. Therefore, eventually, this function is going to disappear.
It is not known when this change will reach all users, but it is most likely not late. The feature is now discontinued, there are no plans to continue with it and therefore it should not be in the browser. If we used this function and we had it activated, it will soon disappear, and we will not be able to activate it using the flags.
Google has already experimented with similar functions before. In 2018, without going any further, the company wanted to add the search term from which the website was reached to the URL. This change was heavily criticized, privacy-wise, and was phased out shortly thereafter. What does seem to have been successful is the function to hide the WWW and HTTPS of the web pages.
HTTPS and WWW will remain hidden in Chrome
The above change does not affect other parameters of the web address. For a long time, Chrome has hidden HTTPS from websites by default, showing a warning only when the browser uses HTTP instead of the secure protocol. And it also hides the WWW of the pages by default, something that, to this day, is of no use other than to waste space.
If we still want the full URLs to be shown, with their HTTPS and WWW, we can do it. To do this, we just have to right-click on the address bar of the browser, and choose the option “Always show full URLs”.
If we want to simplify the browser addresses again, we can easily do it by unchecking this option again. What we will not be able to do again is to leave only the main domain of a website that we visit. This feature disappears from Chrome forever.
