At least with Firefox you don't have to deal with things like this: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467
When Firefox dropped http:// at least they gave you the ability to turn it back on!
When Firefox dropped http:// at least they gave you the ability to turn it back on!
We aren't living in the MS EEE days anymore. You always have the choice to use a different browser. Hell, if you care that much, you can download the source, re-enable the http:// display, and compile it yourself. I really fail to see the problem, here.
Your complaint is that there's no practical difference whatsoever, but that you want to have the choice. That seems to be a pretty minor thing to be kvetching about.
Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the http:// they dont work where pasted. Not having http:// when youre copy-pasting feels like a part of your URL is missing.
What I dont know is for whom they are hiding http://? I'd guess there are 2 types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including the http://, and those who dont need the URL to be visible at all (except maybe the domain name), like they dont need the current path in Explorer. But who exactly needs half an URL which is then only magically completed upon C&P-ing? And those who allegedly dont need http://, why do they need the part after the TLD? From their POV, the arguments part is even more useless than http://.
Yes, but this is part of what makes the "feature" so annoying for usability obsessives such as myself. It makes copy & paste work differently in the URL bar than they do everywhere else and in every other application. Normally copy only copies the text you select. Now when you paste you not only paste the text you selected, but some extra, previously unseen text as well.
I know that once you hide the "http:// you pretty much have to do copy & paste this way, to avoid people pasting incomplete URLs, but it still feels weird, at least to me...
The fewer such excuses there are, the better.