The Easy Way to Display Full URLs in Chrome

Something about a recent update to the Chromium browser on my Linux machine borked one of my user profiles.

No big deal. I’ll just set it back up, right?

Well sure. It took a couple of minutes. But one of my big pet peeves about Google Chrome is this ridiculous idea that the full URL doesn’t need to be displayed.

We could argue the merits of this idea elsewhere (feel free to leave a comment below or reply to me on Twitter if you feel strongly about it), but at least for technologists who build, support, debug, or otherwise work very closely with web properties, WE NEED TO SEE THE WHOLE FREAKING URL, GOOGLE.

Since my user profiles normally keep this setting, I hadn’t needed to solve this problem in a fresh way for quite some time. The old methods involved using chrome://flags (which I definitely used in the past) or even installing an extension (EW!). Many of those solutions persist out there on the web (or even in the Google Chrome help center’s community).

Here It Is: Right-Click in the Address Bar

We’re now formally calling it the “omnibox,” but whichever way you refer to it, you want to:

1. Right-click in the omnibox (address bar)
2. Choose “Always show full URLs”

I hope this helps!