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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

#531

Post by abalone »

stcredzero wrote: post #455
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…

If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. The cost/benefit doesn't work out. It's a usability improvement, but it comes with a huge cost, where many, many sites have the fundamental function of a URL -- that of an address/specifier across the internet -- basically broken. The person who implemented this change either didn't work out the cost, or decided they didn't care. Everyone is hyperventilating…

Again you are shamelessly arguing "the principle of it all" without actual real world examples of problems.. Cite some real problems and we can have a more productive discussion. It doesn't help to falsely equate hiding "www." with corrupting phone numbers.

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

#532

Post by anfilt »

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…

I don't know what ISP does, but good on them for helping their customers.

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

#533

Post by EvanAnderson »

tatersolid wrote: post #449
EvanAnderson wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

This one is kind of a "religious" topic for me, I guess. I'm sorry that it is, but it makes me exceedingly defensive.

I trained on Active Directory (AD) with a group of veteran sysadmins in 1999. I don't have access to the "Microsoft Official Curriculum" book from my class in '99 (long-since thrown away), but I have a distinct memory of a lively conversation in class re: the pitfalls of using a public domain name as an AD domain name (or, worse yet, a Forest Root domain name) during the class. It was very evident to our group of veteran sysadmins that using a public domain name in AD would create silly make-work scenarios (like installing IIS on every DC just to run redirect visitors to "www.example.com"-- just as you describe, albeit IIS didn't natively support sending redirects at the time).

I'd go further and suggest that anybody with a modicum of familiarity with DNS knows having multiple roots-of-authority for a single domain name is a bad idea. Microsoft not supporting split-horizon in their DNS server (like BIND does with 'views') compounded the difficulties with such a scenario in an all-Windows environment.

I certainly wouldn't argue that Microsoft has given exclusively good recommendations for AD domain names in the past (evidence ".local" in Windows Small Business Server), but I am reasonably certain that their documentation always suggested that using a subdomain of a public domain name was a supported and workable option.

I started deploying AD in 2000. I've deployed roughly 50 forests in different enterprises, and I've never used a public domain name as an AD domain name. I've domain-renamed all my subsequently-acquired Customers for whom it was an option (which it was, so long as they had not yet installed Exchange 2007), and have been rebuilding the Forests of Customers who made the wrong decision in the past, where it makes economical sense.

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

#534

Post by Matheus28 »

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…

There is an actual (small) reason for the existence of "www" nowadays. You cannot have a CNAME record for the domain apex (example.com). Many dns providers implement a workaround by resolving the CNAME record into A/AAAA records when queried.

https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-re...

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

#535

Post by dragonwriter »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #530
wst_ wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

> We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs.

24 from the RFC, 26 from the discussion that led to it, per Wikipedia.

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

#536

Post by polaritron »

vntok wrote: post #321
majewsky wrote: post #236

Earlier 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…

No, it's really important to retain all those dots and slashes. This is not sarcasm. I'm being completely serious when I say this. It's really easy notation, and the differentiation of context for dots, slashes, question marks and hashtags is really useful.

  Wikipedia FR > Canada
I look at that angle bracket with the white space, and I get chills. And I'm not even drawing attention to that oh-so-glaring omission of the /wiki/ context. Truly horrifying.

Repeat. This is not sarcasm.

Dark roads ahead, friends.

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

#537

Post by sofaofthedamned »

ergothus wrote: post #527
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…

"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…

There was never a requirement for www. to be anything other than the bare domain for most people. It became useful because it was synonymous with being a web thing right back when people hardly knew what the web was. This was serendipity, which turned out not to be serendipitous when people had to write it on signs / read it out on an advert etc.

I see no reason now to associate www. with the web version of your service. If I receive a request on port 80 or 443 for the bare domain, what's a better option than service the 99% of people who want a webpage?

You are splitting hairs on this one.

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

#538

Post by sofaofthedamned »

dragonwriter wrote: post #535
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

> We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. 24 from the RFC, 26 from the discussion that led to it, per Wikipedia.

Good point. I was on Janet / ARPANet before the web. Point conceded!

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

#539

Post by abalone »

hrez wrote: post #434
DougBTX wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

If this is the worst example anyone can come up with, debugging a misconfigured site while relying exclusively on screenshots of beautified URLs, then I think it proves my point.

There will always be tradeoffs in advancing usability. This is objectively a small one. The problem is the unstated lack of appreciation for the value of usability improvements, because it's usually a more technically sophisticated person criticizing it who's comfortable with the way things have been. If you care about usability, that is an immensely net positive gain.

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

#540

Post by pwg »

jrowley wrote: post #405
mehrdadn wrote: post #392

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.

It is worse than that for some users. I've seen actual users that type/paste real url's into google's search box in order to go to the site. They actually had no idea that the bar at the top of the browser that said "google" (since they/someone set their default homepage to google) was a place where they could delete "google.com" and type/paste the url they wanted to visit there instead to actually get to the site they wanted to visit.
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