Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by sofaofthedamned » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:12 PM UTC

Matheus28 wrote: post #534

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…

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...

Another good point, I forgot about that - thank you.

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

#542

Post by justadudeama » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #529

justadudeama wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If in most uses minds, "www.example.com" is the same as "example.com", then "example.com" is less confusing because they have probably never heard of the word "subdomain".

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

#543

Post by lwansbrough » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

Surely Google of all companies has the resources to see exactly how much disruption this will actually cause. And I don't believe they get to make the decision based on that, but they should share the numbers. Any domain that returns different content between "m." and "www." vs. the apex domain are affected.

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

#544

Post by mythmon_ » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

efreak wrote: post #511

zanmat0 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that Focus is not a full fledged browser, though it is actively being revamped to use GeckoView instead of Chromium. I think the change is in beta right now.

Mozilla is also starting to put more resources into Android (GeckoView, etc). Hopefully we'll see some exciting things in this realm soon.

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

#545

Post by GuB-42 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:15 PM UTC

CmdrKrool wrote: post #464

Lots of people saying this is for the benefit of non-technical users. For me, this is a minor inconvenience, precisely because I'm technically capable/interested enough to handle the inconsistency. But this kind of stuff (and I am speaking somewhat generally here) tends to frustrate me, precisely when I'm trying to educate or deal with a non-technical user in some capacity where it happens to matter. I can't just tel…

Yeah, I think that consistency is greatly undervalued.

Grandma has no problem with technical details being shown, she just ignores them, she just knows that clicking on the button on the top left will go the the webmail and that she needs to click the big red button in order to write a new email. Change anything and she will get lost, click everywhere, and usually find the solution, but sometimes make a mess.

There are also security implications. I told her to be aware of any change, because it may imply a phishing attempt, or some malware. But how is it going to work if legitimate software always change. You are basically training them to stop thinking about what happens, which is terrible since thinking is the only thing that can protect them since they don't have the technical intuition most of us have.

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

#546

Post by pwg » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:16 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #508

emmelaich wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care about the location bar. Everytime they want to use Facebook, they type 'facebook' or maybe 'facebook login' in the location/search bar. And to get to their gmail account they might type their own email address in the location bar.

Ehh this might have been true 10+ years ago, but most people are more savvy than that today.. I think you are describing something that is less and less common (which may explain why Google is trying to encourage people to keep doing it).

You'd be really surprised. There are still people that do exactly what the grandparent comment relates, today, in 2018.

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

#547

Post by abalone » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #462

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…

These types of usability steps disempower the user from having control. It doesn't surface what's actually happening and tries to "fix mistakes" with blunt overly-generalized presumptions. This isn't the first time it's happened. Take the https-everywhere changes. If you explicitly type something like " http://example.com.:80/" but the browser knows about an SSL cert for the domain, it will attempt to shuttle you off…

You begin by criticizing those who would over-generalize, and then proceed to over-generalize by complaining about some SSL stuff. Again this is "the principle of it all" argumentation that doesn't cite any actual concrete real world issues with the change at hand.

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

#548

Post by trjordan » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:19 PM UTC

It's technically correct that www.example.com and example.com are different domains and can serve different stuff.

So are https://example.com and http://example.com.

If you serve materially different content based on small differences, that's user-hostile, and common tools have no obligation to support you. Chrome shouldn't cater to sites that change behavior based on a www prefix, because the vast majority of users expect those sites to be the same. Hiding the prefix won't change their mind.

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

#549

Post by pishpash » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

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…

I'd bet good money this change was put in by people younger than the web.

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

#550

Post by alasdair_ » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 11:22 PM UTC

The worst case of this that I've seen is with Safari on mac. The domain gets completely hidden if it's an HTTPS site that is "verified" (i.e. the entity shows up in Dunn and Broadstreet)

Visit "www.apple.com" in Safari and you will get "Apple, Inc" in the URL bar after a moment.

This seems like a potentially reasonable choice until you realize that someone could register, say "Apple, Inc" in another state and get a HTTPS cert to match it. One phishing email later and the Safari user is convinced they are logging in to the correct domain.

I can see lots of new phishing attacks made possible because of this. :(