Stefan Mileschin

In an article on Wired, Google engineers claim they want to kill the URL and replace it with something less confusing. The Chrome engineers say they've been thinking about the issue for a long time, and tested out an "origin chip" feature that makes domain names stand out in the URL bar way back in 2014. The Chrome browser certainly has a lot of sway in the world of web standards, as shown by Google's HTTPS push and war on "bad" ads. The engineers say they'll be ready to discuss more specifics in the fall or spring. "People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "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. 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."

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2018/09/..._replace_urls/