Chrome kills off the URL entirely
According to reports, Google will change the URL and adopt a new way to locate network resources. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is also a commonly known URL, which indicates the location of a network resource on the computer network and is also a mechanism for retrieving the resource. URLs most widely appear on HTTP web pages and are also used for FTP file transfers, Mailto email, JDBC database access, and many other applications.
The URL was defined in 1994 and has been used for more than 20 years. It has become a necessity for Internet users to access the Internet every day and has become a great tool in application development. However, as the network environment becomes more and more complex, URLs become more and more difficult to read and understand. They are manifested in two aspects. On the one hand, URLs are replaced by more and more garbled combinations, such as the shortcomings that are now commonly used. Linking technology that compresses a long list of URLs into short strings of unknown meaning. These garbled characters can achieve regular network access after the browser transcoding mechanism, but they hide substantial security problems. Because the address indicated by the garbled code is in the end, the human eye can’t directly see through it, so the criminals can use this attack to suffer. For example, they can pretend to be legitimate agencies, perform phishing, and introduce victims into their self-built malicious websites. Analogy, this is also the crisis that the current QR code encounters. Because of the opacity, the user can’t directly see what he will visit. On the other hand, on mobile devices, because the URL is too long, and the device does not have enough space to display the full URL, it also makes the URL challenging to read.
Now in response to this situation, Google has proposed to make a substantial transformation of the URL, seeking a new way to convey the identity of the site.
Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome’s engineering manager, thinks URLs are too hard to understand and are not a good way to communicate the identity of a website. “They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity.“
The new solution has several key points, including enhanced network security and identity integrity, while adding convenience to everyday tasks, such as easy sharing of links on mobile devices.
The Google team doesn’t currently give examples of any new solutions. “I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now,” said Roma Engineering Director, Parisa Tabriz. “But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck.”
The Chrome team has been thinking about URL security. In 2014, Chrome tried a formatting feature called origin chip, which only displays the primary domain name of the website to help users know which domain they browsed. The experiment gained the support of some people because it made the network identity more intuitive, but others also criticised it, and the project died. Parisa points out that this is what you will face when you want to change an old one, and people don’t allow you to change.
