Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by type0 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #198

macspoofing wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The change was made for them, not for you Except, those same users also don't care about things in the address bar. So the change hurts the group of users that actually do care.

They didn't care so far because it was so confusing. The hope is that by showing something that's user-relevant (the name of the website name and the security level), it will become more useful for the average user. Why should a user see: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada?utm=asdioasd&arg=j210d... when all they care about is "Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada"?

http://www.example.com

https://www.example.com

http://example.com

https://example.com

do not have to be the same website and there are cases where it isn't the same site!

Which site you visit does matter and not just for internet banking. If it becomes that easy if we hide things maybe we should hide the half of the traffic lights as well.

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

#222

Post by stronglikedan » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

soared wrote: post #61

Klonoar wrote: post #12

Yo, this is... going too far, c'mon now. While sure, www seems odd now, it's still a subdomain and we're inching into territory of obscuring things that matter for small gains in end-user perception that aren't _that_ impactful.

Why does www matter?

Quoted from a comment in the linked site:

> How will you distinguish http://www.pool.ntp.org vs http://pool.ntp.org ?

> One takes you to the website about the project, the other goes to a random ntp server.

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

#223

Post by drb91 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

trocadero wrote: post #213

ddebernardy wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From one of the comments there: http://www.pool.ntp.org vs http://pool.ntp.org One takes you to the website about the project, the other goes to a random ntp server.

Those go to the same place for me

They definitely do not for me (ios).

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

#224

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #198

macspoofing wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The change was made for them, not for you Except, those same users also don't care about things in the address bar. So the change hurts the group of users that actually do care.

They didn't care so far because it was so confusing. The hope is that by showing something that's user-relevant (the name of the website name and the security level), it will become more useful for the average user. Why should a user see: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada?utm=asdioasd&arg=j210d... when all they care about is "Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada"?

I wonder if there is any research or evidence that users actually find “www.” confusing enough to go through the trouble of removing it.

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

#225

Post by drb91 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #219

I am in favor of the change. I do not think hiding technical information from non-technical users is a bad thing. Making it impossible for technical users to work it out is the bad thing. If technical users want their own browser mode, where all these things are readily available, then I'd be all for that. Clicking on the browser location bar should reveal the full URL. But the noise of the protocol, the www. prefix,…

It’s not that technical, though, to people urls are just strings. Why would people care if they can see the www or not? If anything, this is likely to introduce more confusion.

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

#226

Post by peterwwillis » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #198

macspoofing wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The change was made for them, not for you Except, those same users also don't care about things in the address bar. So the change hurts the group of users that actually do care.

They didn't care so far because it was so confusing. The hope is that by showing something that's user-relevant (the name of the website name and the security level), it will become more useful for the average user. Why should a user see: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada?utm=asdioasd&arg=j210d... when all they care about is "Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada"?

What if the user sees "Wik1pedia.org/wiki/Canada"? Or "аррӏе.com"?

Hiding random parts of the address isn't going to make browsing the web better. The main purpose of URLs is for hyperlinks, not as a highly intuitive user interface. Users who don't know how URLs work don't care what is up there. They only care that what they are looking at is what they expect, and a way to get to where they want to go. And that's a complicated problem.

The URL bar hiding thing isn't for users, it's for Google to push Google search. That's why they attempted to remove the URL bar entirely four years ago and replace it with a search bar.

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

#227

Post by stronglikedan » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

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.

Which drives me crazy, because my users send me screenshots in support requests. Now I have to spend even more time explaining to them how to click/copy/paste the URL. It was a terrible UX choice when Safari did it, and it's a terrible UX choice now that Chrome has done it.

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

#228

Post by dfox » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #133

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.

As I recall, there are some reasonable dns-related reasons that one might prefer www (or any subdomain) to the bare name.

Modern solution to these issues is having SRV record on appropriate protocol sub-domain which AFAIK (and somewhat surprisingly) is honored by most modern browsers.

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

#229

Post by drb91 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

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…

How do you verify the authority owns the content? For instance: AMP urls serve content from a different authority than the one that produces the content.

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

#230

Post by type0 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #139

uberman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the same issue at all, in that domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people. If you have an example of somebody who needs to serve different web content for foo.com and www.foo.com, I look forward to seeing it. But I've never seen one, and when I've seen it happen accidentally it's due to idiocy.

> domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people.

This happen fairly often in universities and some other organizations that can have convoluted structure.