San Francisco — Simplicity through obscurity — Google’s Chrome address bars will no longer feature the prefix — causes geek outrage. Have you ever wondered why people put http:// in front of website addresses? Search leader Google made an interesting move in the latest developer builds of its Chrome browser. The company has stripped out the “http://” prefix from web addresses, leaving them to start solely with “www”.
One of the latest builds of the Chromium web browser is attracting some criticism. As you may know, Chromium is the open source browser project that Google’s Chrome web browser is based on. In the Chromium version 5.0.375.3, something new appeared. The address bar was not displaying the normal “http://” in front of addresses. It was reported in the issues at Chromium’s code site as a possible bug.
The change, which is already functional in the developer version of the browser, may look minor, however, it seems that it is an intentional move, and it has created a fairly heated debate on the Chrome web site. Some of the people posting there do not want to have the http prefix removed. Some people argue that it is a feature that everyone will eventually want.
Although, on the vast majority of sites, you will no longer find those letters. Sites that use “ftp:// or https://,” however, will still display them – to continue supporting these protocols. Also, if you copy/paste an address, the http:// will automatically be added back in for the benefit of those not using browsers that support http://-free addresses.
Users claim that many Internet applications require the use of http://, known as the “scheme,” in order to recognize them as URLs that that can automatically be turned into links.
While the offending Chrome version invisibly adds it to the clipboard when a user copies a URL, this has not satisfied some critics, who claim the change will “train” users to ignore the scheme.
“I like my address bar to accurately refer to the URI I’m looking at,” wrote one angry user, who claimed the change breaks from RFC standards. “Copy and paste is not the issue here. It is deliberate tampering of display of a URI visual function for aesthetics.”
Thom Holweda at OS News, who spotted the change, criticized Google for “hiding complexity” however, saying: “You can cover up that pile of mangled corpses in your bedroom with a flower-patterned table cloth, but that does not actually address the problem of there being a pile of mangled corpses in your bedroom”.
“The URL scheme bears little meaning to most people using a browser — they know it is there and how to type it, but it does not indicate anything to them. Since computing has been about abstracting away complexity for a while now, it was only a matter of time before browser makers started removing this piece of web history.”
There are certain problems though with this change, as far as developers are concerned:
- The change itself was unclear. When developers started noticing it, they interpreted and reported it as a bug. It seems that Google perhaps did not converse with their developers prior to implementing this
- Although the http is hidden, it is not gone. So the change is a visual one, perhaps not a functional one.
- Some developers are worried about what will happen when working with the https or ftp protocols.
- This is not an agreed-upon move, industry-wide.
A presiding officer on Google’s Chrome code forum said: “we include “http:// when copying the URL to the clipboard, so it will still appear when pasted elsewhere.” This is a function that is apparently not in working order for a number of developers.
Currently there are more than 150 comments on the Chrome web site, the large majority negative.