Google Testing Hiding Website Addresses In Chrome’s URL Bar

Want to know that the website you’re currently visiting is the correct one? One way to check would be its URL, where if you’re visiting a website that proclaims to be your bank’s website but displays a different address, then you know something could be wrong. However, for some reason, Google wants to mess around with that notion.

As spotted by Android Police, it seems that Google is testing out a feature in Chrome that will hide the website’s address in the URL bar. This means that when you surf to a website, like ours, instead of displaying the full address in the URL bar, it will only show “ubergizmo.com”. While it might sound like Google could be opening users up to phishing attacks, the company is claiming otherwise.

In an explanation posted onto Chromium, a developer writes, “We think this is an important problem area to explore because phishing and other forms of social engineering are still rampant on the web, and much research shows that browsers’ current URL display patterns aren’t effective defenses.”

However, this is currently a test/experimental feature and according to the developer, if it is not effective at doing what they claim it does, they won’t ship it out. However, if they do find it useful, they will ship it out but even then, users will be given the option to out of it if they feel like it isn’t as useful for them.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Chrome, Google