If this is true it’s just a completely horrible bad idea.
Some browser demolishing an URL and lying to the user is just juck!
It’s also been fashionable for a few years to hide the “http://” or “https://” in URL’s for a while.
With one of the latest updates, Firefox does show the full URL (again) but makes the stuff they think less important a lighter shade of gray. IE:
I’m glad to have the full URL back, an don’t care much about the colors.