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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i use Firefox @ work and @home for serious stuff. The only reason i don't use Firefox 100% is due to the Android app which is a lag fest. Mozilla needs to put more resources on Android.

Have you tried Firefox Focus?

Firefox focus isn't firefox, though, it's a private-browsing-only browser, and it's built on an entirely different engine (chromium, iirc). There's no tabs, history, saved logins, or anything else. It's far from being a full-featured browser. Want to disable javascript or images for a while because you're on data? Too bad, you can't.

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more on the website owners to fix their sites, users expect domain.com to be the same/auto-redirected to www.domain.com or vice versa. I think it's a good thing what Chrome is doing, it will push website owners to correctly set up their domain redirects and in the end, lessen end-user confusion.

No, users expect to type what they see in the address bar, and get the same result every time. Can we even call them address bars anymore? And blaming website owners for working within the bounds of published standards is ridiculous and you know it.

If I asked any non-technical person under the age of 20 the difference between www.google.com and google.com they probably couldn't tell me. Users expect www.example.com to equal example.com. If a website isn't redirecting one to the other, they, are doing something that is incredibly anti-user and it is a good thing that google/apple are forcing them to do it different.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

m. is where you often receive a feature degraded, app-walled, or sign-in walled website that isn't present on the full-featured website. I want to know that I'm receiving a degraded version of a website and that maybe dropping the m. will restore it.

m. is where you find a lightweight, no-bullshit version of a site that doesn't load excessive images or Flash or JS before required. I want to know I'm on a faster version of a website. (Seriously, mbasic.facebook.com allows chat, whereas m.facebook.com reminds you to install the Facebook app.) You're the second person recently to lament mobile sites on HN. I think they're great. Responsive isn't there yet.

Some sites look absolutely terrible on a wide monitor when they are designed for a narrow mobile screen.

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

#514

> 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…

> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general. I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me. It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so…

The comment you are responding to (mine) literally cites this answer:

"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"

It takes only a little bit of thought and empathy with the common user to imagine how this could be confusing. Are you supposed to type in www with every site? Why did it not work when I typed it in? Etc... It's just confusing and unnecessary.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many users never use the url bar. They just 'Google' for websites they want to access and follow the results.

Ohhhh holy cow I never realized Google might want to encourage this. Thanks!

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

#516
post #311

I hope people start moving from chrome to firefox. The standards they pushing are harming the web in ways.

i use Firefox @ work and @home for serious stuff. The only reason i don't use Firefox 100% is due to the Android app which is a lag fest. Mozilla needs to put more resources on Android.

I'm in the opposite boat from you.

Firefox on Android is nice, especially thanks to being able to install an ad blocker.

Firefox on my desktop literally brings my entire machine to its knees, and destroys performance in all other apps that are open.

Pulling that off while not even getting close to maxing out the CPU is rather impressive. :/

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

#517

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.

Fortunately, it's trivial to toggle this setting in the Safari preferences--and then the full URL will appear by default.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general. I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me. It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so…

The comment you are responding to (mine) literally cites this answer: "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" It takes only a little bit of thought and empathy with the common user to imagine how this could be confusing. Are you supposed to type in www with every site? Why did it not work when I typed it in? Etc... It's just con…

Welp I responded to the wrong comment. Sorry for the noise!

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

#519

Considering a subdomain "trivial" is ridiculous... there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com". Not only can they serve different sites, they can even have different DNS records! It seems that "m." is also considered a trivial subdomain. So when a user clicks a link to a "m.facebook.com" uri, they'll be confused why FB looks different when the browser reports it's on "facebook.com". I sincerely h…

I think this is exactly right. All the letters of the name are important and cannot be left off. If people want to equate www.domain to domain they can put a 301 redirect on the www address but the browser has no business making assumptions about what the owner of the name space thinks are equivalent.

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

#520
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…

Compare yesterdays Ars Technica piece, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/google-wants-to-get-... As a comment reads there, do they want to reintroduce AOL keywords? Edit: May we expect a non-standard subdomain "google-remote", which is more of a protocol-extension and will be also hidden?

They already reintroduced AOL keywords in 2011 with their Direct Connect "feature" for Google+, https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect..., so one could go straight to Pepsi's Google+ page with +Pepsi.

They killed it off in 2014.

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