Google Chrome has given up simplified domain experiment

Google Chrome has tried to hide the domain name information in the address bar in spite of the opposition of a large number of users two years ago. The reason for this is to improve security.

Many phishing websites pretend to be well-known websites in the form of subdomains. For example, such domains as www.google.com.xyz.com may be confusing.

According to the function tested by Google Chrome at the time, the browser will automatically hide the domain name prefix in the address bar so that the main domain name can be directly displayed to help users identify.

In particular, it may be more useful to use Google Chrome on mobile devices, while the desktop version of Google Chrome mainly hides the domain name prefix in the address bar.

For example, www.google.com.xyz.com will be displayed as xyz.com on the mobile version of Google Chrome, and those fake subdomains will be hidden.

At present, Google has tested this simplified domain name scheme for more than two years. During this period, due to strong opposition from a large number of users, Google Chrome has also restored its full display.

Later, users objected to Google’s addition of the option to display the complete address, and by default, the simplified domain name is still displayed to improve the so-called security.

But after two years of testing, Google suddenly announced the abandonment of this experiment. Google engineer Emily Stark recently stated that this experiment has no mobile-related safety indicators.

Therefore, the final result is that Google will completely delete this experiment to restore the display of all domain names, but HTTPS and HTTP will continue to be hidden.

Among them, HTTPS will be directly displayed as a black lock representing the use of encrypted connections, and HTTP will be directly displayed as insecure, so it seems obvious.

The essential purpose of Google’s simplification of the domain name experiment is to combat phishing websites. The use of subdomains for such phishing websites does seem to be very confusing.

Therefore, if the subdomain name is hidden, especially if only the main domain name is displayed on the mobile device, the user can intuitively see the domain name to prevent being confused by the subdomain name.

But Google may not have noticed that current mobile Internet users have not paid much attention to domain names, that is, people will not judge whether they are harmful by domain names.

What’s more, most users will not remember the domain names of certain websites or services, in particular, so no matter whether the domain name is simplified or not, it will not cause users to pay attention to the address bar.