Webbrowsers hiding HTTPS is bad

Mozilla decided it is a good idea to hide the HTTPS protocol from the URL in Firefox.

Announced in the blog post “smarter and simpler address bar”, 🔐 HTTPS trim says:

Cleaner URLs with smarter security cues

We’ve simplified the address bar by trimming “https://” from secure sites, while clearly highlighting when a site isn’t secure. This small change improves clarity without sacrificing awareness.

For me the automatic trimming is very irritating.

• When attempting to selecting text in the URL, the URL gets un-trimmed, jumping into a different position
• It hides significant information
• It is intransparent in what is really happening
• It teaches users to not care, and assume secure by default, when tech in general often is not that
• Switching between websites or tabs has a different displayed URL structure and position

In my eyes, this hides significant information for the sake of it. There is nothing cleaner about being shorter when it hides significant information. It’s certainly not clearer or more obvious.

The necessity to highlighting insecure http is irrelevant because you can highlight it either way, whether you display https or not.

How to Disable HTTPS trim in Firefox

1. Open about:config
2. Change browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false

With url trimming disabled, you will see the https protocol again