This past week(ish), Google released a Chrome dev build that did away with the URL protocol prefix. Here’s what I mean:

Note the omitted http:// — yeah, wow. It’s gone. In the timeless words of Keanu Reeves: “Whoa.”

Wait, what?

The hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPfor short) was created as a set of internet protocols when the world wide web was becoming more and more popular back in the early 90s. A standard was drafted and established by the mid-90s. If you don’t know or care particularly what it is, what it does is: the HTTP protocol is a means of serving up web sites on the internet.

Sort of a tangent: Did you know there are several internet protocols that are either currently supported by modern browsers or have been and have been depreciated in browsers in the past? Below is a list of protocols that have been or are currently used on the web (not including proprietary protocols):

• ARP: Address Resolution Protocol
• DHCP: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
• DNS: Domain Name Service
• DSN: Data Source Name
• FTP: File Transfer Protocol
• HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• IMAP: Internet Message Access Protocol
• ICMP: Internet Control Message Protocol
• IDRP: ICMP Router-Discovery Protocol
• IP: Internet Protocol
• IRC: Internet Relay Chat Protocol
• POP3: Post Office Protocol version 3
• PAR: Positive Acknowledgment and Retransmission
• RLOGIN: Remote Login
• SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• SSL: Secure Sockets Layer
• SSH: Secure Shell
• TCP: Transmission Control Protocol
• TELNET: TCP/IP Terminal Emulation Protocol
• UPD: User Datagram Protocol
• UPS: Uninterruptible Power Supply

Are these important? Sure. Do you need to know this? Unless you’re a developer, most likely not.

Whether or not this change is permanent remains to be seen, but it appears so as this change is present in all Chrome dev builds (though I haven’t tried it on Linux, I’m assuming it is). Of course, the protocol didn’t go anywhere; it’s just hidden from the user’s view. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to hide the protocol. Here’s probably why.

1. Things have changed a lot on the internet since the first web browser. Here’s what one of the first graphical browsers I remember using, Mosaic, looked like: 

Speaking to the browser itself, not a whole lot has changed, save for some conveniences like in-lined searching and bookmarking and whatnot. But for the most part, the URL (and protocol prefix) has always been visible. While the browser hasn’t changed visibly, the content that it serves up has changed dramatically. No longer are websites limited to text and color, but we’re now spending most of our time streaming video or farming on Facebook (ugh). Which leads us to…

2. The audience has changed. The internet is no longer populated by a niche group of tech-savvy people. Your mom is online. She’s on Facebook. Maybe even your grandpa uses the internet. As the market for the internet grows more and more diverse, so does a lack of understanding of how the internet works and as a result, you wind up with a more watered down experience. People don’t necessarily know how Flash/HTML5 video is played back to them on YouTube or how the song they buy on iTunes is an actual M4A file, they just know they’re watching a video and listening to a song. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but the internet is becoming dumber.

3. URLs have changed. Not the structure, of course. What I mean by this is we are no longer tied to a single URL for a single site. They’re super flexible. You can type “youtube” in your Chrome URL box and hit a keystroke that’ll take you to YouTube. You can also shrink URLs with popular services like bit.ly. You can change URLs permalinks, to make sites and blog posts more SEO friendly. People copy and paste and share URLs on social networks and on IM all the time. They’re everywhere, though they – as we’ve known them – are becoming less and less important.

Which brings me to Google’s decision to hide the protocol from the user. It makes a lot of sense. We don’t need to see the http:// in front of the URL. Nine times out of 10 it’s redundant. We shouldn’t have to see it. We shouldn’t have to say it either. How many times have you asked someone for a website address and they gave you the whole thing spelled out? H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash… it’s kind of a waste of time. Maybe the developers of Chrome got sick of it themselves, so they’re trying to change it. It’s more efficient to say “youtube.com” than to spell out whole darn thing. 

UPDATE: OSNews has an interesting discussion going on regarding this very topic.

UPDATE #2: It looks like the protocols are back in the latest Chrome dev builds :(

UPDATE #3: Once again the protocols are gone from the latest Chrome dev build! (5/10/10)