Google Chrome 85 once again attacks full URLs

Android Police writes Google is at it again with its fight against full URLs. In the latest test versions of Chrome 85, the search giant is introducing some new feature flags that modify the behavior of web addresses in the browser's address bar.

The main flag hides everything in the current web address except the domain name. The other flags let you change the behavior, one flag displays the full address when you hoer the mouse over the address bar, while the other one only hides the bar once you interact with the page. For web users, this seems like a terrible move.

There's no public explanation yet for why Google is pressing ahead with these changes, but the company has said in the past that it believes showing the full address can make it harder to tell if the current site is legitimate. "Showing the full URL may detract from the parts of the URL that are more important to making a security decision on a webpage," Chromium software engineer Livvie Lin said in a design document earlier this year.