How to disable Chrome’s “Origin chip” to reveal website’s URL

I use Chrome beta for a browser. I was quite annoyed to see that a recent update to my browser took away the URL string. See below:

This is what the Chrome address bar normally looks like.

Google Chrome URL 2

This is the new Chrome-beta update they are trying on some users. Take notice of the address bar. Even though I had clicked on a couple links, the address bar says the website address instead of the URL string.

Google Chrome URL

 

I found an article that talked about this update. I learned that you can disable this feature. Here are the steps.

Step One: Open Chrome and type Chrome://flags

Step Two: Hit Ctrl + F on your keyboard and search for origin chip. You should get a couple options.  “Enable Origin chip” should be set to default. “Enable origin chip in Omnibox” should be set to disabled.

origin chip

Relaunch your browser. You should be back to the default URL string now.

One thing that really annoyed me with this update. When I want to copy a URL ,I need to click the origin chip. Then it would display the URL string. Then I could copy the URL. In my opinion, that is one step too many. I hope this helps you out.

This was posted by techspeeder.

 

6 thoughts on “How to disable Chrome’s “Origin chip” to reveal website’s URL

  1. Appreciative

    Thanks for you tip! I was also annoyed by the feature. It looks cleaner, but for a dev – it is definitely not appreciated. I like the benefit of seeing the whole url at a glance, not a click and then glance. Makes de-bugging a front-end website (e.g. Ember.js) much more tedious.

    Thanks again!

    Reply
  2. jeff

    Thanks a million I had this new feature forced on me and am very glad to be rid of it. Like the last poster i am a web developer and this was making my life hell.

    Reply
  3. Becky

    Wow, thank you so much for posting these instructions. They worked perfectly. I constantly click and copy entire strings to email to myself or others to read later, and it was so annoying to have to click on the address box to get that to show up. Also, when I have several pages open (e.g. NYT or WSJ) it is great to click and see at at glance from the URL what article is below without having to scroll down the page.

    Reply
  4. sue

    I’ve tried the instructions, and they (no longer?) work. Can I get an update on the status of this? Also, I don’t even know what the “origin chip” looks like! A little more info, pretty please?

    Reply
    1. Merlin Halteman Post author

      Hello Sue, thank you for posting. The “Origin Chip” was a new feature that condenses the website URL into a small tile on the far left of Chrome’s address bar. Instead of seeing a long string of letters and numbers, the Origin Chip only displays the base URL. For example, if you went to an article on techspeeder.com, you would only see techspeeder.com instead of the long url techspeeder.com/sample-article/post .

      The steps are the same as stated above except when you search for Origin under chrome://flags you will change the option, “Origin chip” to disabled. I hope this helps.

      Reply
      1. sue

        Thanks Merlin…having coded a few websites in my day, I am familiar with url’s and think seeing them is essential to my work! (I usually work in Mozilla, and suddenly noticed the missing full url in Chrome).

        I was able to find the option quoted below and disable, starting with Chrome://flags (only “Enter” worked on my Windows machine, not Control + F). The item below was found waayyyy down on the list, but I did find it. Thank you so much for your instructions!

        “Origin chip Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS
        Hides the URL in the Omnibox and instead shows the hostname in a clickable chip. #origin-chip-in-omnibox”

        One thing I still wonder about is the statement “When I want to copy a URL ,I need to click the origin chip. Then it would display the URL string.” What does this “origin chip to click” look like??? Not that I truly need to know now that I’ve disabled the thing, but am curious…

        Reply

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