As the makers of the world’s most used web browser and search engine, Google has taken it upon itself to come up with a policy and enforce that users will protect against less confident people on the web. However, as makers of the world’s most used web browser and search engine, the company is also often accused of pushing its own agenda with this new policy. Even something like hiding the entire URL of a website has received a bit of negative feedback, but Google assures that it does so to protect ignorant users from harm.
While most people will probably know URLs as those character strings that represent a website’s address, few actually know how they work or even pay attention to them in the first place. It may be a source of confusion or fear for some, but according to Google, the biggest damage actually comes from spoofing websites.
It refers to a study to study that showed how 60% of users were deceived into thinking they were on the right website when a misleading name of a popular brand appeared in that URL. It’s not hard to imagine considering how history is filled with websites with URLs specifically designed to trick people into entering their passwords in the wrong place. Web browsers have applied many solutions to this problem, including the current practice of highlighting the most important part of the URL and grading others, but Google does not think that is enough.
Google’s extreme solution to hide the full URL only shows the domain part of the address. By removing deletion, Google thinks that users can more easily tell a fake site the real thing. That said, Google acknowledges that this is not yet set in stone and is only part of an experiment that will be applied to a select random group of Chrome users. More importantly, there is also a way for users to turn the behavior on or off as they wish.
Opposition to this complete URL hiding comes from concerns that Google may use this behavior to mask pages coming from accelerated mobile pages like AMP instead of directly from the website itself. At this point, however, it could go either way, but hopefully Google will keep the option to disable URL hiding if it does end up with implementation anyway.
