Google Won't Kill the URL After All

Since 2018, Google has been on a quest to phase out the URL in the Chrome browser. It comes down to security; criminals can too easily craft URLs that impersonate legitimate sites, push malicious downloads on users, and so on. In 2019, the Chrome team detailed ways it wanted to automatically flag sketchy URLs. And in June of last year, the browser took the significant user-facing step of hiding parts of a URL in the address bar. A year later, the company has decided to move on. "This experiment didn't move relevant security metrics, so we're not going to launch it," wrote Chrome security engineer Emily Stark on Monday, appending a frowny-face emoticon. And so URLs live another day, on Chrome and everywhere else.