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Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#21

Post by _0w8t »

hughes wrote: post #13

Anyone know if this checks for a DNS record that supports equivalency between the www/empty subdomains? It's possible for them to have different values.

Even if DNS is the same, the host receives full host name in http and/or TLS headers and can trivially serve different content.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#22

Post by DamnInteresting »

If the browser uses some technique to detect that www.domain.com is functionally identical to domain.com for a given domain, then I don't see a serious problem with this. But if they are short of that certainty, they're obscuring a critical part of the URL, and harming usability (e.g., if I want to jot down a site's URL for later use, I might get something unexpected).

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#23

Post by cjhopman »

theprotocol wrote: post #19
ihuman wrote: post #10

Is this really a big deal? Don't many websites either redirect the www to the non-www, or the other way around?

It's about the principle. www is a valid subdomain. Browsers are supposed to be as unopinionated as possible since they are browsers , not mediators, and their job is to implement the standards of the web.

I didn't realize that the standards of the web specified anything about how an address bar should be displayed (or, for that matter, that it specified anything about an address bar even existing).

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#25

Post by saagarjha »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #22

If the browser uses some technique to detect that www.domain.com is functionally identical to domain.com for a given domain, then I don't see a serious problem with this. But if they are short of that certainty, they're obscuring a critical part of the URL, and harming usability (e.g., if I want to jot down a site's URL for later use, I might get something unexpected).

> If the browser uses some technique to detect that www.domain.com is functionally identical to domain.com for a given domain, then I don't see a serious problem with this.

Say, for example, if the canonical URL doesn't have a "www" in it?

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#29

Post by lkbm »

theprotocol wrote: post #19
ihuman wrote: post #10

Is this really a big deal? Don't many websites either redirect the www to the non-www, or the other way around?

It's about the principle. www is a valid subdomain. Browsers are supposed to be as unopinionated as possible since they are browsers , not mediators, and their job is to implement the standards of the web.

IE did this years ago too, as I recall. I don't know if Edge still does.

Safari also won't show "www" until you click on the location bar, but it'll show once you click.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#30

Post by jwr »

This is idiotic and harmful. We already lost information about the protocol, because somebody believed it is "too complex" for users. Now we're losing other parts of the URL. It's making a joke of the SSL/TLS padlock, too — what exactly is the padlock supposed to tell me? It used to signify that a "known authority" certified that I'm connected to whatever I see in the URL bar. But now that browsers take liberties with modifying the URL bar as they see fit, it becomes increasingly meaningless.
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