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Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

>Showing only the domain name was considered a good way to remove the extra chaff from a complex URL and only leave the core domain visible in the URL bar.

>showing full URLs makes it harder for non-technical users to distinguish between legitimate and malicious (phishing) sites, many of which use complicated and long URLs in attempts to confuse users

Why not simply make the domain name visually stand out from the rest of the url?

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Yes! Bold out the domain and leave the rest of the URL in a slightly lower contrast color.

That's what Firefox is doing

Wow I legitimately never noticed before.

Chrome has already done that for a long time.

It already does, but I guess they didn't think that was enough.

browsers have tried that, and it doesn't do any good because the phishers just make a long enough domain that the bolded part gets pushed off the screen.

? just have the bolded part fixed and the long part off screen ?

hxxps://sub_sub_sub_domain.sub_sub_domain.sub_domain.help234.io/3456/546546/54645/6546/546/4

how would it look for this

Expand the url bar to show the full domain like wrap text in cell works in excel. That would be pretty effective in showing scam urls

+1 to this. We're now in a world where long urls are the norm. The ominbox or urlbox should be [optonally] multi lined with word-wrap.

(Adds the idea to the list of things he wants in his 'Ultimate Browser' that one day he'll write.)

For a while, Firefox on Android used to right-align the TLD with the edge of the URL bar (plus a little bit of space, so you could tell whether the URL contained a path segment or not), so even excessively long subdomains couldn't push the main domain off-screen.

I think that feature got lost again in the recent rewrite, though...

hxxps://...help234.io//////4

Isn't this basically the same solution as the one chrome was experimenting with - selectively hiding portions of the URL that they seemed irrelevant?

Putting some ugly characters in it isn't really any different to just hiding them

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