Goodbye, Google Chrome Address Bar

That sound you hear is the silent death of Google Chrome's URL bar—or at least, the contemplative consideration of such over at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

An email sent to the Chromium developer mailing list by product manager Jeff Chang indicates that Google has, "a number of UI / frontend efforts under way" for Chrome, including the potential removal of the address bar from the standard Chrome interface.

So how, then, might one type a URL into the browser? The address bar wouldn't be gone for good in one of the four "window UI variants" being worked on by the Chrome team. Rather, the "compact" view that calls for the removal of the bar instead relegates the Web address field to a little drop-down element underneath a page's Chrome tab. Tabs—as well as the browser's navigation buttons (back, forth, reload—would all live within one unified horizontal plane.

The "hidden" address bar would appear in two instances: when a page is loading and whenever a user clicks on the tab of a given page itself.

"If we take the address bar out of the tab, it can be used as both a launcher and switcher; the user doesn't have to worry about replacing their active tab," reads Google's description.

The search bar—mashed into the address bar in Chrome's current Omnibox setup—would be separated into its own space to the right of the navigation buttons in Google's proposed "compact" view. While a user would still be able to use this field to query sites and load up Web addresses, essentially performing similar actions to Chrome's current Omnibox, the main URL of a site would disappear once loaded into a Chrome tab.

The weaknesses that Google's identified from such a setup include the aforementioned absence of the current URL for any given page, as well as the fact that navigation controls and menus lose their context sensitivity when they're promoted to equal footing alongside tabs within the Chrome interface. Most importantly, the tab strip gets crowded: navigation buttons, a search box, tabs, and menu buttons would all live on the exact same row.

One thing Google hasn't mentioned, however, is how a hidden address bar would help a user remain safe from phishing attempts: A lookalike web page used by spammers and other attackers to acquire a user's personal details. Currently, any Chrome user can easily see that they've loaded up pcmag.hackyou.com versus pcmag.com--would that harder to detect in a Chrome "compact" view?

Chang said he intends to provide weekly summary emails, released to the public, to discuss Chrome's ongoing UI development.