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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

#441

Post by cptskippy »

basch wrote: post #424
daveFNbuck wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.goo…

What's your rationale for this? The removal of the superfluous www subdomain makes sense. It puts to actual unique site information immediately after the padlock.

Most sites either redirect to it away from www when you visit them anyways.

People have always said to host your site at www and redirect to it, something I have never understood nor heard a convincing argument for.

I have my servers configured to redirect visitors away from www.

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

#442

Post by wpietri »

ryandrake wrote: post #232
slg wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that simply due to internal politics? Whoever owns foo.com might delegate www.foo.com to someone else, but they ultimately control both.

Either way, www.example.com and example.com can differ in terms of IP address, underlying hardware, actual website content, and probably other things I don’t know. They are different URLs. It seems problematic to assume they are the same.

Not at all. People already assume they are the same. And they have for 20 years. Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. Anybody clueful redirects one to the other. The only reason they're separate is that a) the web wasn't dominant when it was introduced, and b) technology of the time made it hard to manage traffic in ways we can now.

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

#443

Post by sandov »

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…

What are the improvements of hiding part of the URL?

>Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway?

My university doesn't work with example.com but does work with www.example.com. I see how someone could waste a lot of time trying to solve a nonexistent network issue because typing example.com doesn't work, but he had seen it working before.

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

#444

Post by hobs »

Spivak wrote: post #429
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.

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?

Because you need sufficient complexity to design a system where users can make things you dont bake into the system.

Would we have the web if we would design it today?

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

#445

Post by yladiz »

DougBTX wrote: post #407
slenk wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first citibank url doesn’t load for me, so it is site vs not site rather than two different sites, and both those ntp urls are redirecting me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ - perhaps there’s less substance than meets the eye to those complaints.

No, actually, there's a really good complaint here -- if you're hiding "www", then the two Citibank URLs look the same when they are actually not in Chrome, and the user will be confused when typing in the URL that they've visited many times before and not actually being able to visit it because now Chrome obfuscates the "www" part.

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

#446

Post by sulkie »

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…

Could you have not used a similar argument for AOL Keywords?

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

#447

Post by 13415 »

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…

It's about as smart as hiding filename extensions, and the results will probably be similar. Increased confusion and more security risks.

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

#448

Post by UncleMeat »

peterwwillis wrote: post #226
ehsankia wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Users don't see that.

Expecting users to use the URL bar to detect phishing via homoglyphs is insanity.

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

#449

Post by tatersolid »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #426
runjake wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You lack the compassion that comes with experience.

My $dayjob has our AD root domain the same as our public root domain. Because we implemented AD in the year 2000, and this was Microsoft’s recommendation for domain naming way back then.

And if you use Exchange, you can’t rename your AD domain, you have to rebuild your forest and migrate piecemeal. So we’re stuck with it.

The practice of using Corp.example.com did not evolve until many years after Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 were in the wild.

So we run http redirectors on each of our domain controllers to send traffic to www.

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

#450

Post by LocalH »

ender7 wrote: post #440
slenk wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So citibank and NTP will need to change their domain structure. That's okay: those are confusing structures. This is a tradeoff -- continuing to support already-confusing differences is not worth the loss of the ease-of-use gain referenced in the grandparent.

It seems like the Internet is moving more to a "centralized" design where certain actors have decided "well, here's how we're going to do things now, deal with it".

The golden age of the Internet is already dead, guys. We're unfortunately over the hump.

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