Flipping through Google Reader the other day, I happened upon an article by the Internet Explorer team regarding a new feature they had debuted in the recently released IE8 Beta 1 called “domain highlighting”. Put simply, the address bar in IE8 will now colour all text of the URL bar the top level domain grey, the “highlighted” text remaining black. The highlighting is always on, and cannot be switched off by either the user or a loaded website.
Not having a copy of Windows to download IE8 onto, I have not yet had a chance to play with this new feature. However, in its current form my initial impression of it is not favourable.
The official line at Microsoft is that this is something that needs to be done as a start to highlighting potential phishing sites. While a laudable idea, I get something of a sense of cutting the nose off to spite the face.
First of all, it starts by assuming that all URLs are potential phishing sites. Does this include local URLs inside an intranet? What about addresses I have typed in myself?
As was noted in the user comments of the article, there are several well adopted URL structures that this feature does not work well with. Sub-domained sites, or sites using sub domain structured URLs as their main URL (such as del.icio.us) will be shown either incorrectly or incompletely. The only way the user will be able to see the entire domain is to move the mouse cursor over the Address Bar.
But the big bug bear for me is why do you have to obfuscate the rest of the URL information by default? No part of a URL is irrelevant, and information contained in URLs is becoming more and more relevant as time goes on (logically structured URLs, URL based identity management, etc). Why do I need to hold my mouse over the address bar to be able to see this? Surely there are better ways to emphasise the domain block of the URL? Embolden it. Change the colour of the domain, not the rest of the URL. Hypertext blue makes for good contrast against the black and white, why not use a scheme like that?
The idea is a good one, but the implementation could be better.