In a move that many developers will raise an eyebrow at, Google have decided to omit the showing of http:// in the address bar of their latest dev build of Chrome. Although this is quite a change to make it seems that Google decided to not express much info about the change publicly as the lack of http:// in the address bar was filed as a bug by one sharp eyed user.

One developer replied to the bug report stating that the apparent bug is in fact a feature of the browser. Naturally this invoked a lengthy discussion regarding the removal of http:// the workhorse protocol of the web that has been around since year dot.  Naturally many developers and comments made  aren't in favour of the omittance and I can understand why.

Many fear that omitting http:// will break a lot of applications when people try to copy and paste a URL, or when some web apps try to autoparse a URL. Some need http:// in the URL to do whatever it is they're trying to do. However Google say that this should not be the case, as http:// is added to the clipboard when the URL is copied. This is not a perfect solution though, as some systems may not fully support using the clipboard in this manner. It remains to be seen how effective this solution will be if Goolge decide to keep it. It will be interesting to see if this feature will be seen in Googles Web centric OS, Chrome OS when it is released later this year. Other protocols such as ftp:// and https:// seem unaffected and remain viewable in the address bar.

My view on this is that Google should revert back to showing http:// as not including it will cause people to be come lazy when typing URLs, not to mention that fact that it breaks years of standardisation that we have all become used to as users, never mind it being technically correct to add http:// to a web url. Some  applications as stated previously require http:// and having a system where people don't have to type it will induce a situation where usability is affected.

Source: OSNews.com