“Google has finally chopped the ‘www’ from Chrome’s address bar after delaying the controversial move due to a backlash,” reports TechRepublic: The move to remove ‘www’ was initially planned for last year, when Google announced it would cut “trivial subdomains” from the address bar in Chrome 69. Now Google has begun truncating the visible URL in Chrome for desktop and Android, rolling out the change in version 76 of the browser, released this week. By default sites in Chrome now no longer display the “https” scheme or the “www” subdomain, with the visible address starting after this point. To view the full URL, users now have to click the address bar twice on desktop and once on mobile. Google has argued the move is driven by a desire for greater simplicity and usability of Chrome… However the announcement provoked a fresh wave of criticism, from those who say the move will confuse users and even potentially make it easier for them to inadvertently connect to fake sites… There are also some who claim Google’s motivation in changing how the URL is displayed may be to make it harder for users to tell whether they are on a page hosted on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages subdomain… Google says it has also built a Chrome extension that doesn’t obfuscate the URL to “help power users recognize suspicious sites and report them to Safe Browsing”. Despite the backlash from some online, Chrome isn’t the first browser to truncate the URL in this way, with Apple’s Safari similarly hiding the full address.
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https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/03/0317238/google-just-stopped-displaying-www-and-https-in-chromes-address-bar?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed