Google removes options to always show www in the Chrome browser’s address bar

From now on, users of Google Chrome who visit the sites www.example.com and example.com will only see example.com in the browser’s address bar.

Google made a change to Chrome 76 earlier this year, which has removed the www part of the web address from the address bar of the browser. Chrome cut the www part in that version by default; Google engineers claimed that most users did not need the information.

In most cases, this is not information that most users should be concerned about.

Some users found that Google removed an essential part of the address of a website because www.example.com and example.com do not necessarily load the same source. Although it is possible to double-click in the address bar to display the full URL, it is another step that users must take to find the full URL of a site if it is being cut by the browser.

Chrome users can restore the old status quo by adjusting an experimental flag in the browser. The change would restore the www. share in the Chrome address bar so that it appears when a site uses it.

It appears that Google has removed the option in Chrome 79 that was released a few days ago. From now on Chrome users have no option to restore the www part of a web address if it is used by a site in the browser with the experimental flag.

The only option that remains available is to install the company Suspicious site reporter extension for the browser that restores the information. The disadvantage of installing the extension is that it gives Google permission to read the browsing history.

Popular Chromium-based browsers such as Vivaldi, Opera, Brave or Microsoft Edge have not yet implemented the change. It remains to be seen whether they follow Google and hide the “trivial” part of the address in the browser or whether they make patches to restore the complete information instead.