if you are familiar with the itunes store or windows vista's location bar you will notice it splits your location into fragments. so i have this concept that would do something similar in web browsers. this would not involve changing urls or the way the web works but it would change the way urls are displayed in browsers. the reasons for implementing this would be to make the casual browsing experience more user friendly. every interface element has some use with the exception of url's which often times appear as random strings of code.

this is a google search url. it makes no sense to the average user and is often of no use:
httρ://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-ca&q=url+simplification&btnG=Search

broken down into sections:
http://
this is the default scheme for web browsing. https is commonly represented by a lock so these two need not be shown all the time. ftp for example would appear in this new address bar.

www.
unless the subdomain is something else, www. should not appear.

google.com
the domain name and tld will always appear in one cell

/search
this is a page or folder with the google.com domain, which would appear in the following cell.

?
anything past the question mark is a query. this is what makes the page dynamic. anything here has been inputted by the user or are preferences that can be changed on the site itself. these could be editable individually by power users but would be hidden by default as they are rarely touched by the majority of users.

individual queries:
hl=en&
english
client=safari&
safari browser
rls=en-ca&
my country and language
q=url+simplification&
what i searched for, url simplification
btnG=Search
i pressed the search button

so all of this would be summed up into
google.com > search
things like httρ://www., queries and port numbers would be hidden. percent encoding like %28 for ( or %20 for a space would appear as actual symbols.

to see the standard url, the queries or to copy the url as a hyperlink, the user would click on the blank spot on the right of this address bar and would be given those options. links would be copied and pasted in their full form.

other examples:
httρ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Day
would appear as
en > wikipedia > wiki > St. John's Day

httρ://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1175245928479&
pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=2847933028B01
would appear as
linksys.com > servlet > Satellite

so does this look like more trouble than it already is or is there potential?