The web has been around for some time now, and the world is divided into two camps: people who get it, and people who don’t. If you open a browser, type ‘google.com’ in the address bar and then type ‘facebook.com’ into the Google search box, you don’t really ‘get’ the web.

Google is hoping to rectify that, with a small, and fairly obvious change that no one has ever really thought too much about. Their Chrome browser no longer displays the ‘http://’ in front of the domain name in the address bar.

The change has caused a stir in the web nerd community, with accusations of dumbing down the web, and questions about what happens when one copies and pastes addresses in and out of Chrome.

Google insists the technology is smart enough to take on all challenges. The ‘http://’ is still there, they say, it’s just hidden. Copying an address from Chrome will include the full address, and Chrome will handle addresses pasted into it accordingly.

It’s evident to all now that non-nerds are way more comfortable with search as a means of finding sites than using the address bar. Recently there was a case where a website writing about Facebook’s login became more highly ranked in Google than Facebook’s actual login page, the result being that hundreds of people left comments on the page complaining that they preferred the old login.

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