We thought we had this covered, but we don't.

We were showing all URLs.  But then we found about://blank while on the new tab page (a native page).  See  issue 738583 .  We now hide the URL for all native pages.  However, this does not look good for other pages like chrome://history.

We need UX (and possibly security) to indicate exactly when we should be showing a URL.

In my opinion we should show the chrome://... URL for those pages, i.e.
chrome://history/
chrome://newtab/
etc.
I think this is less confusing than an empty URL bar or even hiding the URL bar completely. But that is just my two cents.

We should take cues from Clank here.

- In cases where the user types these addresses into the omnibox, we can let them use default behavior (show text).
- However, as with clank, we should be able to special-case some of these pages when accessed through normal means (i.e. not typing out by hand into url bar).

The upcoming 1.0 spec will dive into details here, but from a high level, we'll likely want special case presentation for newtab, history and downloads, among others (like in Clank).

Clarifying special-casing:  Even when I manually type out chrome://newtab, the URL bar disappears.  It seems like the special-casing isn't based on how the user lands on the page, but rather which page it is (which is much less scary).

This bug isn't tracking 1.0 special implementations of things like NTP; certainly when we get there, the URL bar may be doing different things.

Based on these comments, it sounds like we should:

1. Figure out how to make all pages (history, NTP) show their proper URL.
2. Figure out how to special-case pages, such that *if* we want to, we can continue to hide the URL (or the whole URL bar) on things like the NTP.  We might not actually need this.

Gordon, after talking to Tibor, we'd like to do (1) but not (2).  We'll implement that unless you disagree.

It's true that Clank does sometimes special-case the handling of chrome:// addresses manually typed into the Omnibox. I don't think we need this. However, we do need to be able to special case the handling of these views in other cases (for example, navigating to newtab via UI).

Hi Emily, hi Lucas,

After discussing this issue with gordonbrander@ and cjgrant@, we decided to show the URL in VR for native pages if the URL is of the form chrome://.... We hide it if it is of the form chrome-native://.... The reason is that chrome-native:// URLs are of no use for the user. They cannot navigate to the native page using this URL. Rather, Clank does a Google search with the URL as the query. However, chrome:// URLs can be typed into the URL bar and Clank navigates to the respective native page in the case of chrome://newtab/ and chrome://history/. I'm not aware of any other chrome:// URL that navigates to a native page. This behavior is mostly in line with Clank. Clank shows the URL for chrome://history/ and never shows chrome-native:// URLs, not even chrome-native://history/ (except of when you open chrome-native://interests/ remotely through the developer console, which is not relevant here I hope). This means for the NTP and the history page the URL will be sometimes shown and sometimes not depending on how the user navigated there. This is the same for 2D Clank and VR. Would that be ok for you?

Comment #12 sounds okay to me

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f451212a559072f4f2810175d5960a58ccf2b692

commit f451212a559072f4f2810175d5960a58ccf2b692
Author: Tibor Goldschwendt <tiborg@chromium.org>
Date: Fri Aug 18 22:58:48 2017

[vr] Show chrome://... URLs on native pages

Hide all URLs that are of the form chrome-native://... and show all
URLs of the form chrome://.... For other URLs defer to the
ChromeToolbarModelDelegate.

Bug:  691576 
Change-Id: Iff25abbdaba86bb016735927ea14f795fbb7884c
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/617947
Commit-Queue: Tibor Goldschwendt <tiborg@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Michael Thiessen <mthiesse@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Michael Wasserman <msw@chromium.org>
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#495724}
[modify] https://crrev.com/f451212a559072f4f2810175d5960a58ccf2b692/chrome/browser/android/vr_shell/vr_shell.cc
[modify] https://crrev.com/f451212a559072f4f2810175d5960a58ccf2b692/chrome/browser/ui/toolbar/chrome_toolbar_model_delegate.cc
[modify] https://crrev.com/f451212a559072f4f2810175d5960a58ccf2b692/chrome/browser/ui/toolbar/chrome_toolbar_model_delegate.h