> If I'm reading you correctly, your actual point of contention is “nonidentical icon/text without a much larger color/layout difference looks sufficiently simi

> If I'm reading you correctly, your actual point of contention is “nonidentical icon/text without a much larger color/layout difference looks sufficiently similar in overall appearance as to be essentially identical for the purpose of conditioning users who aren't intentionally looking”. Yes, the decision seems to be intentionally making them confusing. That or else I can only assume they didn't really think through the design decision much. However, my understanding is that Google is intending the EV company info to be removed from the address bar altogether in a future release. Both of these decisions seem to be poor choices, in my opinion, and I think it is a loss of useful information. By contrast, Safari 12 no longer displays the EV company name in the address bar, however EV certs result in the lock and domain name being green, and if you click on it, you get a nice popup explaining what legal entity the certificate is issued to. In Chrome, to get that information you have to dig a few levels deep, expanding a tree control and understand X.509 certificate fields. Based on that changes that are being made in Chrome, it seems they want it to be difficult to learn what information is contained within the cert. But then the rationale is that no one understands what EV certificates means. If there was an honest effort in helping users understand security, I would think their experiments would involve making it easier to find certificate details and understand them, not remove them and make them similar to non-secure sites. This is why I said in my original comment "Hopefully there will be some sort of push for useful additions to certificate security coming out of Google, as right now they seem more determined to just be undermining things." It isn't too far a stretch to think that the lack of effort in improving he display of certificate information and trying to downplay URLs is because Google wants more users to become more dependent on them as the way to find and authenticate web sites.