Starting with Google Chrome web browser version 76.0, it will hide parts of the URL displayed in the address bar (called omnibox for Chrome). Now it will hide the parts such as http or https or www. For example, if you visit https://www.trishtech.com/, it will only display trishtech.com in the address bar. Google developers give the reason for this change that users find these parts very confusing. For making it easy for the Chrome users to understand the URLs, they have done away with the technical parts and now will only display the actual domain name instead of the protocol used to fetch it.
Chrome hides scheme, trivial subdomains, and query strings from the URL. The scheme of a URL is the protocol used to access it http or https. Trivial subdomains are common subdomains used by websites such as www. Query strings are used for passing parameters to a web page such as ?search=apples. You can see where these parts fit in the following image:
- Launch Chrome web browser, type chrome://flags in the address and and press Enter.
- In the search box, type Omnibox UI Hide. to find the experimental features we need.
- Disable these three features (change their state to Disabled) –
- Omnibox UI Hide Steady State URL Scheme
- Omnibox UI Hide Steady State URL Trivial Subdomains
- Omnibox UI Hide Steady State URL Path, Query and Reference
- Click on the Relaunch Now button to restart Chrome web browser with new settings.
- Now Chrome will no longer hide any part of the URL displayed in the address bar.
It should be noted that these changes are made only in the latest version (76+) of the Chrome web browser. If you are using a portable version of the Chrome web browser that chances are that you could be using an older version and you won’t notice this URL hiding feature in the web browser. And if you are an ordinary user, then perhaps you should keep the default settings and let it hide the parts of the actual URL.