The excuse that this is to prevent phishing would make more sense if not for the fact that Firefox already has a much better solution to this in displaying only the domain in full black/white and the rest of the URL as a less visible light grey. Chrome did something like this before too, but less pronounced. It being very pronounced in Firefox seems to work based on my experiences.

Chrome does this now.

Apparently, it's just an experiment. https://blog.chromium.org/2020/08/helping-people-spot-spoofs...

I'm not a fan, though.

I pretty sure they don't give a fuck about user opinion. 6 months later, this will be the default. But don't worry, there will be a chrome://flag hidden somewhere for the most vocal complainants.

Google AMP is still going strong.

Flags tend to disappear after a while, though.

As mentioned in the linked thread, Safari already does this. You still get the full URL when you tap open the URL bar. Personally, that's worked perfectly fine for me. I generally don't tap the URL bar just to look at it: only if I already decided to edit it or copy/paste it somewhere.

Right-click on the URL, select Always show full URLs.

This is about 90%+ of people who will not do that. Which is possibly the majority of desktop web browser users. Especially if any of the Blink wrapper browsers follow suit.

This is about 90%+ of people who will not do that. Which is possibly the majority of desktop web browser users.

Still on Firefox 55.0.3 (64-bit) because of the way both Google and Mozilla are handling user interface changes. Considering switch to IceCat or WaterFox.