NewsGoogle Chrome Hiding http://

Google Chrome Hiding http://

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Google Chromium developers have decided that users don’t need to see the http:// in the location bar anymore and there’s backlash galore.

In the latest developer version of the open source Chrome Web browser http://www.developer.com became simply www.developer.com in the location bar.

Most people commenting on the new “feature” hate it.

“This is a bad change and should be reverted,” mhaisley said. “This is Google using market share to force a change that doesn’t comply with relevant standards.”

The problem, some argued, is that people often copy-and-paste Web addresses from the location bar in their browser and leaving off the http:// will result in lots of invalid URLs being strewn about Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

And while adding the http:// portion to the copied data is a fix – that opens up a pandora’s box of usability issues.

“This breaks the standard clipboard functionality, which just doesn’t seem right,” mhaisly explains. “Users expect that when they highlight X, and press copy, they get X, instead chrome is going to present Y. There are use cases where this may cause unexpected results. For example when a user copies www.google.com and pastes it into say ping.”

Some commenters were just baffled by the change – it appears to be a solution looking for a problem.

“This change seems more than a bit odd to me as well,” one person wrote. “It could be that it’s my 16+ years of habit speaking here, but somehow training people to drop the http:// feels wrong.”

For some it’s really all about the standard.

“You’re breaking conformance with IETF RFC 3986 for the display of URIs. While you’re not breaking conformance with the actual query, you ARE incorrectly displaying the request syntax outlined specifically in IETF RFC 2616. It doesn’t say ‘Globe icon’, it says ‘http:’ ‘//’ specifically,” kjonesinmo said.

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