Google Resumes Its Attack on the URL Bar, Hides Full Addresses on Chrome 86

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has tried on and off for years to hide full URLs in Chrome’s address bar, because apparently long web addresses are scary and evil. Despite the public backlash that came after every previous attempt, Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name in Chrome 86, this time accompanied by an admittedly hover animation. The new look builds upon the animation-less hover reveal that’s already in testing, but in contrast to that method, the improved variant also displays the protocol and the subdomain, which remain invisible in the older version. That’s achieved with a neat sliding animation that moves over the visible part of the URL to make space for the strings preceding it.