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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

#141

Post by pathartl »

Instead, what they ought to do is go through the top 10,000 domains and test to make sure that:

1. www.* doesn't end up as a 404 or DNS resolution error

2. www.example.com matches the content from example.com

3. www.example.com -> example.com is a valid permanent redirect

and then finally

4. Publicly shame them. Don't hide it from people because you run into all sorts of UX issues.

I really hate www. for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one is just thinking about the amount of time spent saying it out loud. Nothing aggrivates me more than turning on the radio and hearing "go to our website DOUBLE YEW DOUBLE YEW DOUBLE YEW DOT ". That's like two seconds of air time they could recover.

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

#142

Post by CydeWeys »

ancarda wrote: post #49
jwr wrote: post #30

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 wit…

Given the adoption rate of SSL, I imagine the padlock itself will become useless even without Chrome's changes. Does it mean anything if almost every website has it?

That's why Chrome is moving away from showing the padlock to displaying "Not secure" for sites that aren't secure. The padlock will be going away entirely; secure is the default state.

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

#143

Post by download13 »

jwr wrote: post #30

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 wit…

You can still click and see the whole URL. This is just making it easier for the average user to see the most important thing to them, which is the domain name.

It's not like they're just changing stuff randomly. The TLS padlock change has been going on for a while now, and not without reason. As we get to a point where almost everything is served over TLS it doesn't make sense to tell the user every time. It makes more sense to only notify them of the exceptional situation where we're on an insecure connection.

The certificate authority system is terrible, but it's what we have for now. There's been some advances to help make it better though. CT for example, ensures that if anyone starts making fake certs we can all see it at least.

I suspect (and hope) that browsers will slowly transition to using trusted spotters to verify certificates in addition to (and eventually instead of) authorities. If you remember a few years back when moxie marlinspike made that promising, but underspecified cert verification system that relied on the user supplying a list of trusted verifiers and the browser basically goes to each of them asking "I see cert 88:A4:etc" for domain "google.com", do you see the same thing? The idea was to make it really hard to MITM someone since you'd also have to MITM every verifier the browser asked. Not impossible, but probably harder than getting a fake cert under our current system.

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

#146

Post by michaelmrose »

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #71

Thank you to whomever submitted this. My main annoyance is that when I want to go to a subdomain, I'll typically start typing foo.domain.com, but now the browser sets it to www.foo.domain.com. Annoying.

What browser auto inserts www? It's neither firefox or chrome.

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

#147

Post by nimrod0 »

uberman wrote: post #127
wpietri wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing jwr's point. He's arguing that this is harmful for users, especially the ones who don't know what the words mean. If I were solving this, I'd instead push to eliminate "www" altogether, not sweep it under the rug. It was useful circa 1996, when users might plausibly be using something other than the WWW with a browser. But it has become entirely vestigial.

Why not drop .com then as well? Most sites are on .com domains after all. It is exactly the same issue. A domain is a domain. Google is arbitrarily dictating your CNAME from the user's perspective. What if you don't serve your site off of mysite.com is google going to automatically try again at www.mysite.com? What if you have distinct content at both domains? This decision is stupid.

Yes, why not drop URL's altogether then? Why display such "technical" things for the plebes?

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

#148

Post by ggggtez »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #123
soared wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of users have no idea what any of the words you just said mean. The change was made for them, not for you (the .1%)

Citation needed. Did you ask anyone? Did you do any research?

Presumably your question is for the Chrome team, and I'm gonna assume the answer is: yes, of course they did research. They did research for the padlock, etc too.

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

#149

Post by nimrod0 »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #144

Lest anyone think that Chrome is being innovative here, this is Safari's default behavior for when the URL bar isn't focused. When you click on the URL bar, the subdomain, protocol, and path all appear.

A much saner behavior is to hide the URL entirely until focused, not to show a secretly mangled version.
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