Google abandons URL shortening in Chrome

Google abandons URL shortening in Chrome

Google has called quits on the notion of truncating URLs in Chrome, according to a note from earlier this month in the Chromium project's bug database.


"This experiment didn't move relevant security metrics, so we're not going to launch it," Emily Stark, a staff software engineer on the Chrome team, wrote in the June 7 entry.


Android Police first reported on Stark's note June 10.

Stark's notification, which referred to what Chromium — the open-source project that produces code for Chrome and several other browsers, including Microsoft's Edge — called the "simplified domain" experiment, put a end to efforts designed to abridge what shows in the browser's address bar.


In August 2020, Google announced — Stark was one of the trio of engineers who penned the declaration — that it would run trials with some Chrome users that would hide much of a site's URL. The idea, Google said, was to foil phishing attacks.


"Our goal is to understand — through real-world usage — whether showing URLs this way helps users realize they're visiting a malicious website, and protects them from phishing and social engineering attacks," the engineers said.


The trials began with Chrome 86, which launched in early October 2020.

Rather than display all of an URL, Chrome instead condensed it to what Google called the "registrable domain," or its most significant part. If the full URL for, say, a Computerworld article was https://www.computerworld.com/article/3082024/google-android-chrome-os-flip-flops.html, then the registrable domain — and the only bit that would show in the address bar — would be ..

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