Domain Highlighting – Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) new Security feature

that’s wonderful, now how do i turn this cr*p off?

Seriously, this has got to be one of the worst ideas I’ve ever witnessed. I just uninstalled explorer 8 just because of this awful feature.

I’d like to meet the guy at microsoft in charge of this “brilliant” idea and give him a piece of my mind. I can barely see my link now that it’s grey!! Thanks for saving me the time to just look at the left side of the link. Dont you guys have anthing better to do than lame little features like this that TOTALLY ruin the user experience. You’ve got to be kidding me microsoft, please disable this!!!

Microsoft = The Devil

I’d like to meet the guy at microsoft in charge of this “brilliant” idea and give him a piece of my mind. I can barely see my link now that it’s grey!! Thanks for saving me the time to just look at the left side of the link. Dont you guys have anthing better to do than lame little features like this that TOTALLY ruin the user experience. You’ve got to be kidding me microsoft, please disable this!!! I just uninstalled explorer 8 just because of this awful feature.

Are you kidding me? I hate this. There should be something in the tools that can turn this off.

It took me a long time to get used to IE7 after IE6.
It was a huge change in technology and I was confused.

That’s why I hate new stuff. I am a guy that prefers things stay the same forever rather than make life easier, this makes you lazier and this is just confusing

Please give me an option to diable this crap. (and whatever it is that they replaced autocomplete with as well)

If I don’t have the option to diable this then I’ll just go to using Firefox full time and not look back.

I JUST LOVE IT!! It makes phishing and spoofing much harder!!

I hate this function! It’s not useful.

Wow…. so… this feature “TOTALLY ruined the user experience” for you, huh?

Just…. wow.
Like…. I don’t have words to express how dumb you are.
The english language, with its millions of words, is actually inadequate to come up with a word that expresses how dumb you actually are.

While I concur that it seemed out of place and almost silly at first, I managed to spend 30 seconds sucking it up, and now, after that long, tiring 30 seconds, I could honestly care less if it’s greyed out or not.
But you’re almost violent over it… holy crap dude.

See, this is why I would push for needing a license to use a computer… some of you clearly are not ready for technology.

The is the worst thing I have ever saw on the internet and it is annoying as hell. I have tried to uninstall and reinstall going through the custom menu and it did no good, and have went in internet options to try and turn this off. Finally, when I did figure out what this was suppose to be called I found out it is not able to be turned off. I have wasted alot of time to get this off and it is not possible. I am going use safari until IE finally gets the point people do hate this and can not stand it.

Every new release, a new annoyance. Don’t they do customer testing? Some of us actually subconsciously take in URLs and use them. How am i going to do this if i can’t see it?How many times have you had a spoofed domain in the address bar? I use the internet every day and have never had one. Stop treating us like idiots microsoft, or give us the options to turn these things off.

For the live of me I can’t understand this Domain Highlighting thing. I just hate it. I’m an Internet Developer and I am constanly am making quick changes in the address bar to access staging servers for testing. I have to squint to see the rest of the damn address unless I focus on it. And why they don’t give the user some obvious option to turn this nonsense off is beyond me. If you like this utter crap fine but give the rest of us a way out of MS hell.

This is the worst browser “feature” EVER. Give me a break, give users an option to disable this POS. Otherwise, you’ll lose even more users with these great “inovations.”

There needs to be a way to disable it, if even a reg hack. I work with long URL’s with lots of query string parameters and this makes my job much harder as the quesrystring is much harder to read now. Unfortunately, I am stuck with using IE as this is what our testing platform is built to run on… And Thomas (Comment by Thomas on March 26, 2009 @ 8:49 pm), you need to realize that people use IE for more than just surfing, and the domain name is not the only important part or the URL. This feature is bad and will kill the experience for many users who use IE for testing and dev work.

Mike’s right. Do they ever host a focus group or they just want to annoy the most people each time they release something. I have IE as my second browser, because I need it for some specific sites, but the grey url thing is another reason why the more knowledge the user get, the more chance it goes out of the Seattle empire. And I don’t even dropped a word on that ridiculous bug between Windows Update declining access to IE 8.

Please, please, please, give us the option to trun this off. PLEASE!!!!!!!

Horrible feature, I develop web pages and NEED to SEE the entire url. Having to mouse over the address bar just to read the url is ridiculous. An option to turn this off is needed desperately.

It is quite annoying feature. Could you make an option to get this domain highlighting off please! It’s making the url harder to read and you don’t easily know on witch page you are on the same domain. A better idea to highlight the domain would be to bold it with the same color as rest of the url.

The domain highlighting does not work properly for extensions like .uk.com,, .us.com or .gbr.me

Domain highlighting is a great feature for those who wish to use it, but for those of us who don’t want to use it, for those of us who find it simply annoying, we’d really appreciate a way to TURN IT OFF!

Not cool MS, NOT COOL! I’ve got OCD to a minor degree, I can’t stand when things don’t match up!! Please get rid of it, for all the crazy people!

Domain highlighting sucks. Fix it MS.

Annoying feature!

How can this be in the actual release? Didn’t anybody notice during beta testing that this feature sucks?

And no way to disable this.. WTF!

Think for a moment how would people respond if newspapers would be written like this. It’s tiring for the eye since it’s difficult to read and highlighted word catches your attention.

Waiting for the option to disable this..

i had to revert back to IE7 because of this stupid domain highlighting feature which is damn stupid.. nice if u could turn the feature off..

Ok, so very occasionally it might be useful to easily see what the domain is. But by greying out the rest of the URL so its almost impossible to read is just stupid. I often want to see the rest of the URL – and not have to hover the mouse pointer over it to see it.

if MS want to incorporate stupid features like this, at least give user the means to turn them off. For now I shall be using another browser whenever I can.

Disabling the feature would certainly be a reasonable addition. However, for most of you who are anoyed, please notice that once you click with the mouse and/or put a text cursor into the URL string, the highlighting feature turns off by itself. Hence, there is no issue with not seeing it. The highlighting feature is definitely useful for many people (and most users do not even look at the url and go to web sites by searching in Google or using favorites someone else have saved for them) in that it al least teaches them to be aware that the URL is a dinamic thing. This will also teach some of the developers to make their pages stay in the same domain – I am referring to the cases I noticed myself where I login to e.g., bestbank.com, but after few clicks find myself being working at onlineacces.com/bestbank os something like that.

Nonetheless, WizGnome, it IS annoying, especially since it’s far less effort to glance at the address bar than to constantly hover your mouse in place (especially since you go back to the grayed-out state the minute you remove it). I’m already quite aware of how domain names work, I know how to avoid phishing, and I don’t really need Microsoft’s help in the matter.

Installing an “off” switch for this add-on would have been simple common sense — let the people who need it keep it, while the rest of us do without. As it is, it’s a little like having a permanently activated “Clippy” (remember Clippy?); it adds little in the way of functionality while irritating a number of long-term users.

Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this soon. Otherwise, I think I’ll be looking into Firefox or Mozilla.

I found this while searching for a way to turn this greying out of the address bar off. It’s really getting on my nerves.

There should be an option called “I’m not an imbecile, I know what a phishing link is, please trust me and allow me to see the address in one colour.”

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one this annoys to no end!

When IE8 auto-installed on my laptop, I quickly uninstalled it, mostly because I found THIS quite annoying!

But now I’ve got a new computer too, and IE8 is what came with it. So, I don’t believe I can go ‘back’ to IE7 since there’s nothing to go ‘back’ to on this?? (Please tell me if i’m wrong! I’d LOVE to be wrong for once LOL!)

And… it really irritates me.
AND the fact that when I open new tabs, the tabs are COLOURED?! I mean, seriously!! Are Microsoft taking us for IDIOTS?!

*sigh*

I wish I could say I’m getting used to it, but I am not. At all.

Yes, I too found this website when searching for a method to disable the dumbest thing ever to come out of Seattle.

I’ve seen it around the office on coworkers computers and can’t stand it. Most of them didn’t even realize anything was different. These clueless users are the ones that Microsoft was intending to help out perhaps… However, the dumb ones never look at the Address bar anyways, so what was the point!?!?!

And to have this slip through beta testing and make it to full release is one thing, but to not realize the frustration that it would cause to the “advanced users” (who happen to also be the ones who love to bash Microsoft on forums) and leave out that simple “Disable Domain Highlighting” checkbox is beyond me.

What was the QA team doing in Microsoft while this annoyance was being introduced?

At least allow for the feature to be disabled. I need to be able to look at the entire URL while at work without squinting everytime to see which f*ing page I am working on in my domain.

Thanks but no thanks Microsoft

…while mousing over the address bar …this feature gets disabled.
Hurray!! now I can always drag the cursor over to the address bar if I have to take a quick (I mean a quick) glance at the page I am on.
This doesnt help a lot either… because I might as well have selected the url to see it in white contrast with blue background.
Just the action of moving the mouse over to the address bar eveytime one has to read it clearly…can drive a sane person crazy.

Damn this is annoying. To make matters worse I’ve always found black text on a white background annoying, so the first thing I do when installing windows is to change the default background color to grey (with a slight touch of blue). Now the grey part of the url is all but invisible.

I just upgraded to IE8 today and, after spending forty-five minutes disabling the massive amount of toolbars and options cluttering up the display, decided to do a search about how to disable ‘domain highlighting.’ Apparently, there is no such option. Lovely.

I’ve wasted an hour trying to make this display useable but that irritating address bar is unacceptable. It’s hard to read and doesn’t do me any favors- I’m perfectly capable of reading a domain name without assistance and would greatly appreciate being given the option to do so! Until IE8 provides a disable option for domain highlighting, I’m using Firefox.

And I see that I’m not the only one…