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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

#421

Post by EvanAnderson »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #401
abalone wrote: post #393

> This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains... What ISPs teach their users anymore these days? Why the heck do we want to go back to that? Time for a modicum of historical perspective. If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part o…

Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.

I don't want anything about the Internet to be like television, and while I know you're trying to make an analogous statement I think the real threats to freedom on the Internet are coming from entrenched interests who would take what you say literally.

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

#422

Post by Donzo »

mehrdadn wrote: post #392
Donzo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why Google is doing this is because they are slowly trying to do away with URLs, as direct traffic is probably their greatest untapped segment. Google is trying to get users to go through their doorway pages, which is exactly the kind of thing for which they penalize publishers. Pay attention to when you enter direct addresses, let's say from a device/media subscription authorization page. The autosuggesti…

Sorry, what? Could you expand on this? What do you mean by doing away with URLs?

From the linked article:

"I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now," says Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome. "But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck."

https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

She's says it's important that they do something! GTFOH! Hands of our Internet!

The problem here is that they view Chrome as their platform. They have too much market share ala IE6. Instead of following and helping to shape standards, they are considering highjacking the project. Argh!!!!!

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

#423

Post by TheKarateKid »

slenk wrote: post #396
abalone wrote: post #393

> This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains... What ISPs teach their users anymore these days? Why the heck do we want to go back to that? Time for a modicum of historical perspective. If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part o…

Two prominent examples noted in the bug: https://citibank.com.sg and https://www.citibank.com.sg are different, http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org are different. Like, big companies run separate servers on the two domains. That's besides the fact where if you have www.example.www.example.com, it rewrites to example.example.com.

Just because a major bank and government organization use an unusual domain configuration, it doesn't mean that it is good practice.

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

#424

Post by basch »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #406
redleggedfrog wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.

How does hiding part of the domain make the web any easier to use?

if anything, it should be time to declare that its a bit insane to expect lay people to be able to read from right to left and left to right concurrently, and understand all the delimiting punctuation correctly, along with unicode. its time to restructure url rendering to be right to left, and combine delimiters. dashes, periods, slashes, and subdomains and hundreds of tlds have made it too confusing.

https://www.google.com./ should become either https/com/google/www/ OR secure/com/google/www/ OR secure.com.google.www. Browsers can then just always bold the third word?

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

#426

Post by EvanAnderson »

runjake wrote: post #241
trocadero wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com" Can you link to a site where these two are different?

Many orgs do this. For example, with Active Directory, the DNS A record for your foo.com domain must resolve to your domain controllers. Your www.foo.com will resolve to a separate non-domain controller web server. I think a lot of the commenters here are thinking solely in terms of commercial web services such as twitter.com and such, but there's so much more to the wider landscape.

Thinking about it that way gives me conflicted feelings. Much as I hate what Google has done here I also feel like any organization stupid enough to use their public domain name for their Active Directory domain name deserves every little pain they receive for it.

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

#427

Post by master-litty »

jamiek88 wrote: post #385
nichochar wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know it’s a setting, right?

Hiding file extensions in Windows is a setting, too.

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

#428

Post by EvanAnderson »

Donzo wrote: post #389
masswerk wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly subverting the domain name system. I can't see the value or gain in security by this. (If you want to put focus on the domain, then display the host-part with less contrast, i.e. grey, but don't hide any potentially vital information. Otherwise, put out a RFC, defining "www" as a substitute for "*", or a zero-value atom, in order to guarantee consistent behavior.) Edit: There are also legal concerns…

The reason why Google is doing this is because they are slowly trying to do away with URLs, as direct traffic is probably their greatest untapped segment. Google is trying to get users to go through their doorway pages, which is exactly the kind of thing for which they penalize publishers. Pay attention to when you enter direct addresses, let's say from a device/media subscription authorization page. The autosuggesti…

This needs to be a top-level comment.

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

#429

Post by Spivak »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #401
abalone wrote: post #393

> This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains... What ISPs teach their users anymore these days? Why the heck do we want to go back to that? Time for a modicum of historical perspective. If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part o…

Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.

I really don't know why you consider that a bad thing. It's a little bit silly that users have to know or care about what a domain/url is. Like if a user is just trying to get to, say, CNN, can they not just type in CNN and have the browser do the rest. Why put additional barriers?

Would we really design this system today?

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

#430

Post by UncleMeat »

masswerk wrote: post #294
masswerk wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly subverting the domain name system. I can't see the value or gain in security by this. (If you want to put focus on the domain, then display the host-part with less contrast, i.e. grey, but don't hide any potentially vital information. Otherwise, put out a RFC, defining "www" as a substitute for "*", or a zero-value atom, in order to guarantee consistent behavior.) Edit: There are also legal concerns…

A proposal for better security with domain names: The domain name system has been around for decades and it's a clever and proven system. It can – and should be – taught in school and, arguably, knowledge of it is, while not difficult to obtain, essential in our times. Additional ambiguity in this is probably not what we want. Arguably, the most sincere problems arise from mixed alphabets with Unicode domains and loo…

> Arguably, the most sincere problems arise from mixed alphabets with Unicode domains and look-alike characters/glyphs.

No way. The most sincere problem is that hostnames do not enforce any binding to a real world identity that users can understand (nobody inspects certs) and that the most trustworthy component of a hostname is the second to the last section (right before ".com"). Humans tend to look at the front of the URL, making "www.bank.evil.com" a mind bogglingly effective phishing technique.

Homoglyphs are almost always a sign of bad behavior and can just be banned to a large degree. The fact that "foo.com" or "foo.evil.com" are not necessarily owned by company foo is much worse.

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