With Chrome 76, Google has once again started to strip the “www” subdomain and “https://” identifier from URLs shown in the address bar.
In a Chrome bug post regarding this issue, product manager Emily Schechter stated that after testing for several months in the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels, they are going to start hiding “https” and “www” in the Chrome omnibox starting in version 76 on desktop and Android.
Surely we can all agree that URLs aren’t exactly as userfriendly as they once were – the kinds of garbage strings you often get these days are entirely pointless to users – but just flat-out removing parts of the URL for simplicity’s sake seems rather pointless.
I’m on the fence about this being the best solution, but there is a problem this solves and its not a pointless endeavor. The problem is the specificity of urls increases from left to right, i.e. the most important bits are at the end. There is only so much horizontal real estate, so anything that can reduce the amount of space the bits on the left use up in UI is a win, as long as the user does not lose context.
If you know that the site you are on is https (because of the lock icon) and you don’t care that the hostname is www (because for the vast majority of sites it is irrelevant), not displaying those parts means you can display 12 additional characters in the rest of the url before resorting to truncating it with an ellipsis. Also those 12 additional characters become more significant the longer domain names become, and over time they are trending towards becoming longer (we are currently at the point where anything remotely meaningful below 5 characters is already registered)…
I’m using Chrome 76 now, and frankly it isn’t bothering me a bit. The full url is still copied when you perform a clipboard operation, and if you want to see it for some reason you just click on it twice and it expands in place – seems reasonably to me (not great, but reasonable).
galvanash,
I don’t mind this that much either. I’ve never found “www.” to be useful in the first place, it’s redundant and useless. Hypothetically it might go to two different sites, but that would be a pretty bad idea IMHO. Ironically some of my client’s SEO companies insisted that we needed to add www. I reluctantly comply but frankly I don’t see the point and apparently neither does google.
Sure, www. has been redundant and useless ever since gopher and ftp ceased to be more than curiosities, but some sites either go to a different page (incredibly poor site design) or *don’t accept* an address because it either has or doesn’t have those four characters (usually just an easily fixed oversight). Bandcamp.com was in the second category until I sent feedback in April – I’m sure those artists who had www. at the start of their links would have lost some sales!
A subdomain like www can be used to optimise the website with respect to cookies. e.g. if the website uses example.com then all cookies will be registered under example.com and hence will be resent for every image, script, and css file that comes from example.com or any of it’s subdomains. While if the website uses http://www.example.com then it can put it’s other resources on Xi.example.com where each Xi is a subdomain different from www so that cookies will only be sent when necessary. And example.com can just redirect to http://www.example.com so that for the user typing example.com still works.
Even sites that do not use this optimisation right now can still benefit by using www from the start if they plan to do this later on since it will prevent them from having to invalidate old URLs.
It is a small optimisation but an optimisation none-the-less.
All of this to dumb down Joe User.
The https part of the url can be implied by the padlock so I don’t care so much about that change. The www part is a big deal because as a developer. i might actually have to go to different sites for testing. We frequently have qa, stg, dev domains and there are even public sites with multiple sub domains such as apple.com vs developer.apple.com
Google is now forcing changes on us that we don’t all want and since they now control the web it’s over. We’re all screwed unless we want to spend 10 years making a new browser. The POS doesn’t even run on most operating systems. (win, mac, linux, android only, i don’t count the iOS webkit shell)
I wish browser vendors would just ask on first launch if you’re a power user or not. Default to not of course. I’ve been using a browser for decades, I don’t need it dumbed down any further.
Its just a default, they are not forcing anything… Just put this in the url bar
chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-trivial-subdomains
Firefox doesn’t show the right side of a url if it’s too long, but that doesn’t matter – just hover over the url and you get the full path as a tool tip.
I can understand why the Chrome team is doing this, however I still do not like our current situation.
Even now, on a relatively modern laptop, I am looking at the current URL of this page, and see:
osnews.com/story/130464/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar…
with the URL method and www. prefix removed.
If they were not to be removed then more stuff from the right side would disappear:
https;//www.osnews.com/story/130464/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-a
For a reference the entire URL is:
https;//www.osnews.com/story/130464/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar-again/
which does not fit in the address bar at all (thanks to the so many extensions I have on the bar).
So it is a tradeoff, we either cut some info from the right, or the left.
I would have preferred a simpler URL though. Then we would not have the issue in the firs place.