Google Chrome is considering ways to kill the URL

Sundar
Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Android, Chrome and
Apps, speaks about wearables during his keynote address at the
Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco June 25,
2014.
REUTERS/Elijah
Nouvelage

• Google operates the most popular web browser in the
  world in Google Chrome.
• The Google Chrome team is looking at ways to
  revolutionize URLs — to make them both easier to understand and
  more secure.
• Google Chrome may share some of its ideas publicly
  later this year, or in early 2019. 

The team behind Google Chrome, the most popular web browser in
the world, is considering an idea that would change the way we
all use the internet, according
to a new report from Wired.

Whenever you open your web browser to visit a website today, you
either search for the site’s name in a search engine like Google,
or you type out a specific address, or URL, into the browser.

But while remembering some URLs can be easy — adding a “.com” to
most business names usually does the trick — it’s not perfect.
Some websites now have different domains to remember, like “.biz”
or “.info,” and since most people on smartphones usually can’t
see the entire URL they’re visiting, it’s easy for cybercriminals
to trick people into thinking they’re on a trusted website.

For these reasons and others, the Google Chrome team thinks it’s
time to come up with a better solution.

“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,” Adrienne
Porter Felt, engineering manager at Google Chrome, told
Wired.

“
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 Google Chrome team still hasn’t finalized a solution to
URLs — the Wired report said the Chrome team “is still
divided on the best solution to propose … and the group won’t
offer any examples at this point of the types of schemes they are
considering.” But the ideal solution will be more
secure than the current setup, and more convenient for people to
remember, too.

Google Chrome’s engineering manager Adrienne Porter Felt said her
team “will be more ready to talk publicly about its ideas this
fall or in the spring.”

You
can read more about Google’s plans to fix the URL over at
Wired.

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