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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

#521

Post by wst_ »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #497
parliament32 wrote: post #118

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…

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the " http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you ty…

How about older people? Can your parents explain the difference? Mine can't and I can assure you most of them are the same.

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

#522

Post by justadudeama »

jake_the_third wrote: post #505
lytedev wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what's broken? I understand it's displayed incorrectly in the worst cases and obscurely in most, but broken?

1. Org hosts physical web server at www.example.org. 2. Google directs user to www.example.org. 3. User sees url as example.org and notes it down. 4. User needs to visit example.org again, but for some reason it doesn't work. 5. User goes to coworker who shows him that example.org does in fact work (hidden www). 6. Endless confusion ensues. This is bad UX decision on Google part (on top of it breaking published stand…

This is going to be a problem weather or not Chrome changes www.example.org to example.org. There is a _very_ non-trivial chance the person was going to write down example.org anyways.

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

#523

Post by abalone »

jlg23 wrote: post #496
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…

> Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. I do. Over and over again. Having been doing that for 2 decades, and with a limited budget, I require things like SNI[1] to work. But of course, I could just triple the tech budget... EDIT: And wrt "Time for a modicum of historical perspective." - p…

And how does this break SNI? It's just a UI change.

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

#525

Post by NathanCH »

wingworks wrote: post #468
hrez wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

user1 - https://citibank.com.sg doesn't work for me user2 - it's fine, here is a screenshot of it working (while showing "beautified" https://www.citibank.com.sg ) how is that not confusing?

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.

I think this is a fair comment but Chrome has been doing this a lot lately. They'll make a change and developers must scramble to fix their websites.

It's the same with autocomplete earlier this year. One day Google decides to ignore autocomplete="off" and all hell breaks lose.

Interesting to note, they have reverted this change. Google now respects autocomplete="off" in some scenarios (i.e. when autofill is not triggered via name attribute).

Note: autocomplete !== autofill

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

#527

Post by ergothus »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #497
parliament32 wrote: post #118

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…

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the " http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you ty…

"www" was not a marketing trick, it was legitimately a different domain, by convention. General users never understood it, so companies started to have to add it to match their weird expectations.

To associate a base domain with a company identity happens to be true MOST of the time, but isnt actually true. Plus, foo.example.com follows different security rules than bar.example.com (CORS, certs, etc)

The problem here is that the precise domain has a technical meaning...but consumers are using it for a different meaning. Once that is also useful BUT NOT THE SAME.

Pretending the url matches this new meaning (and altering the display to match) serves both groups poorly.

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

#528

Post by bwblabs »

cptskippy wrote: post #441
basch wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had some years I thought the same way, however:

From a DNS point of view: you can't have CNAME's on your root (can be useful, especially in some DNS load balancing situations, or load balancing on third party providers)

From HTTP point of view: A no-www domain might not be the best solution if you ever want a 'Cookie-free Domain' (static.) for images etc. which speeds up your site. If you start with a no-www domain you have to setup a different domain (no subdomain) for it: like sstatic.net for SO, ytimg.com for YT and yimg.com for Yahoo.

When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there.

If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies. In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free. https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_fr...

in my view having a www record (and no-www redirect) has more benefits that a no-www

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

#529

Post by inetknght »

justadudeama wrote: post #522
jake_the_third wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Org hosts physical web server at www.example.org. 2. Google directs user to www.example.org. 3. User sees url as example.org and notes it down. 4. User needs to visit example.org again, but for some reason it doesn't work. 5. User goes to coworker who shows him that example.org does in fact work (hidden www). 6. Endless confusion ensues. This is bad UX decision on Google part (on top of it breaking published stand…

This is going to be a problem weather or not Chrome changes www.example.org to example.org. There is a _very_ non-trivial chance the person was going to write down example.org anyways.

But why add to the confusion by hiding important information?

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

#530

Post by sofaofthedamned »

wst_ wrote: post #521
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the " http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you ty…

How about older people? Can your parents explain the difference? Mine can't and I can assure you most of them are the same.

Good point - but even my mum (65 and not very good with phones or computers) will just bash the bare domain into her browser.If it's got "www." she'll use that, if not she won't. She still knows it's a web thing, the www. for her and everybody else is superfluous.

Things change. We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. The people who can't deal with this are vanishingly small, and those that can't are likely not your target market; or they're the sort that'll just consider Facebook to be the web.

I'm not disagreeing with your point btw that some people can't deal with this - all I disagree is the extent.

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