Google is messing with the address bar again—new experiment hides URL path

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  The new experiment: after loading, Chrome shows only the domain name. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

It looks like Google is trying to mess with the URL bar again. As spotted by Android Police, new flags in the developer versions of the popular browser now want to hide the URL path. So for an article like this one, instead of "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/google-is-messing-with-the-address-bar-again-new-experiment-hides-url-path/," the address bar would show "arstechnica.com."

For now, the feature isn't on by default. You have to have the developer versions of Chrome and need to dig into chrome://flags to enable the feature, which is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref." Everything in Chrome://flags is an experiment, but most Chrome changes land here first before they are rolled out to stable versions.

With main flag on, the full URL appears while the page is loading and then simplifies to only the domain name once loading is finished. Clicking on the address bar will display the full URL, as will switching tabs. A second flag lets you tweak the behavior so that the full URL appears when hovering over the address bar.

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