Spirited discussion! I think for the average Joe, this change does not matter (i.e neither good, nor bad). Two better changes: a) highlight https / secure connections even more prominently, and b) detect and highlight misspelled domain names (a major cause of phishing attacks). Rationale is that for the average Joe, a clear warning that they are about to go to a bad site is more valuable than looking at the accurate domain name.
Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
371–380 of 919 posts
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the browser absolutely 100% of the time knew that difference and showed "Wikipedia FR > Canada", wouldn't it be much simpler for the average user? The browser could even show specialized UI such as "FR" as a clickable dropdown menu to allow users to switch languages. Chrome already does this for searching a single website through the address bar (type domain.com TAB) Basically these changes are not thought for you…
Maybe it could show "Canada - Wikipedia" like the page authors intended as a title. Maybe if the page authors want to have links between languages, they could code that in a standard markup language themselves. These aren't decisions for a useragent to make, and there aren't enough browsers out there that people have a reasonable choice. Bastardising the url isn't a solution to anything, it's a step towards something…
A useragent is literally a user's agent, it is supposed to help its user browse their target website. It is not supposed to help the target website show things to the user.
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there is a huge difference between those two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
If the browser absolutely 100% of the time knew that difference and showed "Wikipedia FR > Canada", wouldn't it be much simpler for the average user? The browser could even show specialized UI such as "FR" as a clickable dropdown menu to allow users to switch languages. Chrome already does this for searching a single website through the address bar (type domain.com TAB) Basically these changes are not thought for you…
Hiding the URL would be a terrible idea, no matter how much "simpler" it would be for the average user: it would either only be enabled for a handful of websites chosen by Google (which would mean having an inconsistent UI) or create a lot of security issues (what if someone creates a website and manages to also display "Wikipedia FR" with a similar layout?).
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#374Is anyone else starting to see parallels between Google's attitude toward "progressing" Chrome and Microsoft's attitude towards IE in the 3-8 version days?
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
99.9% of motor vehicle users have no use for airbags. We still keep them for the .1%.
This is a very bad analogy. Anyone in a car crash potentially benefits from airbags without knowing anything about them (or even if they exist at all). The 99.9% of people who don't even know the difference between www and non-www will never directly benefit from seeing www, ever.
unless they need help
and get one of those .1 percent to help them out
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#376Safari already hides "www.". In fact it hides everything except the root-level domain, e.g. " https://www.google.com/about/" shows just "[lock] google.com". Firefox and Opera show the full domain but gray out everything in the entire URL except the root-level domain, so "www." is gray. Just saying, de-emphasizing and hiding parts of the URL is clearly a trend. This isn't just a Google thing.
this is actually the main reason I cannot use Safari. It always boggled my mind that they made this decision.
For power users, they never look at the url unless they want information from it, in which case the `www` is valuable.
For low tech users, it can lead to straight up incomprehensible issues, like sites not rendering properly (think of a `m.*`).
The UI gains are so small, that part of the screen is never really looked at, but needs to be there, and typically has tons of horizontal room... I don't get it
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have more information about this?
https://jdebp.eu/FGA/dns-srv-record-use-by-clients.html
Browsers don't use SRV records for HTTP. With them one wouldn't need www subdomain CNAME hacks.
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
My bet is this decision is driven somewhere by marketing morons who want 'www.google' (presumably a domain that will at some point exist, the TLD already does) to render as simply 'google'
Technically there's no reason why a TLD can't have an A record. If they own "google." they can point it to whatever address and serve whatever they want.
There are even examples of TLDs that do resolve.
See: http://to. (it redirects to an advertising/malware site for me, so be warned)
Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#379Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL
#380Safari already hides "www.". In fact it hides everything except the root-level domain, e.g. " https://www.google.com/about/" shows just "[lock] google.com". Firefox and Opera show the full domain but gray out everything in the entire URL except the root-level domain, so "www." is gray. Just saying, de-emphasizing and hiding parts of the URL is clearly a trend. This isn't just a Google thing.
this is actually the main reason I cannot use Safari. It always boggled my mind that they made this decision. For power users, they never look at the url unless they want information from it, in which case the `www` is valuable. For low tech users, it can lead to straight up incomprehensible issues, like sites not rendering properly (think of a `m.*`). The UI gains are so small, that part of the screen is never reall…
Low-tech users don’t often understand that a difference could possibly exist between “m.” and “www.” at all.
However, if it shows the TLD, they can confirm it says “google.com”. Imagine they’re visiting a Paypal phishing link, to the domain:
www.paypal.com.www.com
The most important thing to show the user is “www.com”, because they’re expecting “paypal.com”. All the rest is nonessential for protecting users from bad actor sites.