Chromium Blog: A fresh coat of chrome

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

A fresh coat of chrome

Friday, June 25, 2010

Omniboxdev channel

When you are typing into the Omnibox, an icon to the left will show how your input will be interpreted - such as a magnifying glass for search queries (

), and a globe for URLs (

). When you’re not typing, the same icon can be dragged to another document to copy the current page’s URL, or clicked to reveal information about the current site.

When on a secure (SSL) site, this icon changes to a lock (

) - previously we displayed the lock icon at the end of the Omnibox, but now it’s closer to the URL and in a more obvious place.

We’ve added a clearer presentation of Extended Validation (EV) certificate holder names (

), which, like the lock, are now at the beginning of the Omnibox.

We’ve changed the colors and icons used with secure sites to make mixed content more obvious, and avoid confusion about ambiguous colors.

In some situations, we’ve stopped displaying “http://” and/or a slash after the hostname. This makes the hostname more prominent and the URL more readable, and provides more visual distinction between regular and SSL websites (which keep their “https://” prefix). We’ve also done a lot of work to make sure that copying and pasting of these URLs continue to work as you would expect.