The Mountain View company is testing a new display on Chrome that would significantly reduce the URL bar. This is not the first time that Google has tried to hide or hide the URL bar. The project has already been criticized several times, but the American firm multiplies the arguments to justify itself.
Google assures that long URLs tend to scare people. “People have a hard time understanding URLs. They are long to read, it is difficult to know which part is trustworthy, and in general I do not think that a URL is a good means of transmitting the identity of a site ", already explained Adrienne Portert Felt , Engineering manager at Chrome, in 2018 at Wired.
Hiding the URL bar would also increase security on Chrome by preventing users from becoming victims of phishing attacks based on fake URLs. An argument that is hard to pass since, to verify that these are legitimate sites and not a fraudulent version, users consult the URL of the sites on which they surf.
Infantilization of Internet users?
Some see it as an infantilization of Internet users on the part of Google. In fact, many users browse the web by consulting - without necessarily being afraid of their length - the URL bar. Rather, it is due to a lack of knowledge of the Internet that some novices are fooled by false phishing sites rather than by the format of the URL.
Others, like Android Police, question the motivations of the Mountain View giant: reducing URLs would allow, according to this expert, Google to push sites to switch to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format which hosts sites on Google servers. It remains to be seen whether the project will succeed. For now, this is still just a test.
High-Tech
Google: Chrome users victim of massive espionage linked to more than 70 extensions
Society
Carrefour and Google carry out a voice command to order its shopping online
- Internet
- Navigator
- High-Tech
- Google chrome