Recent update to latest dev in Google Chrome seems to have brought a change in url display.
While browsers display URL's as "http://news.ycombinator.com/",
this builde of Chrome currently does it as "news.ycombinator.com".
The same happened in the Google I/O Chrome Web Store preview. The url was of the store was not prefixed by "http://". Other protocols, https/ftp, are explicitly listed, though.
Is it another step towards minimalistic approach, as most url's have "http://" in them, so why not skip displaying it? Or does it have some technological relevance?