You may have noticed something in the latest version of Chrome: There is less stuff in the URL bar. We blogged last year that Google was going to drop the “Secure” label for Websites, based on the assumption that all sites should be secure. Now they have removed the http:// or https:// that you’d usually see up there and they’ve also removed the “www” subdomain prefix. So on our website, as an example, it used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

The little padlock icon is there because our site is secure.

But change is change: The padlock is there to designate secure websites, and chrome has “Not Secure” warnings there as well.

Regarding the www removal: Technically speaking, www.weston-tech.com and weston-tech.com could point to different places, they rarely do for most configurations, so that’s why Google decided to do this with Chrome. If you want to see the full URL, double-click on the URL bar, install Google’s Suspicious Site Reporter or change the hidden setting by typing “chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains” in your URL bar and hitting enter to change the back-end setting.

In addition, the developers of Chrome and Firefox have announced a change in the handling of Extended Validation SSL certificates. These certificates were presented with a green bar in front of the URL that displayed the company name from the certificate (due to additional certificate verification). This will be removed in future Chrome and Firefox versions. More information over at the Bulletproof TLS newsletter.

How do you feel about this change? With Chrome controlling most of the browser market, we’d love to see what you think of this. Comment below with your thoughts.

From information from a technical standpoint can be found on Bleeping Computer and Google’s Bug Tracker.