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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

#591

Post by chiefalchemist »

pests wrote: post #563
pwg wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You seem shocked at this with word usage like "actual users", "real url's" and "actually no idea" But how are we to expect users to know any better until general technology literacy improves? Many people can't tell you the difference between a modem, router, OS, browser, or website. I remember years ago sitting down with my elderly grandmother trying to show her how to use a desktop... We are too close to our work so…

> "Many people can't tell you the difference between a modem, router, OS, browser, or website."

They don't care, nor should they. How many people know how many spark plugs are in their car?

You're correct. We, the more tech-literate, take too much for granted; and most experiences and learning curves are too far over the head of the "average" user.

It's not them. It's us.

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

#592

Post by kristopolous »

abalone wrote: post #547
kristopolous wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't used it yet so I can't cite any actual concrete real world problems it solves either.

Are you claiming an attitude of hiding important technical details and creating dysfunctional smart systems in the name of usability doesn't exist? Or that these are unrelated things and the narrative arc isn't there?

There's numerous other examples, such as the gtk3 file-chooser dialog which hid a number of important controls in the name of usability.

What about mobile vendors, to make their devices friendly, remove a number of android customizations such as the ability to disable ambient display?

What about sites like reddit who removed a number of features such as the ability to edit a comment on their mobile site as a UX improvement?

Or what about the laptop vendors who remove keys such as Escape?

It appears that all technologies are slowly tending towards an aspirational goal of being designed for illiterate toddlers.

Luckily I know where this comes from.

Illiterate toddlers, as it turns out, use lots of software on tablets and smartphones. Looking at usage metrics and presuming that everyone is a competent adult, efforts at user-error reduction tend towards humans with diapers and pacifiers as they make the most errors and any demographics statistics of those errors will false positive as their parents, since the infants don't have their own devices.

Why do you think bright colors have better click thru rates for ads or using cartoon mascots or smiling men and women of child-rearing age increase inbound traffic and are seen as an important branding strategy for user engagement? Could it be toddlers tapping?

Maybe that solves the problem of why these boosting effects only appear on mobile devices since 3-year olds can't operate a mouse.

These trends give rise to design rules and "insights" which have a contagion effect on all software, just like the soft keyboard on the iphone led to the removal of physical keyboards from effectively all smartphones. Until every complex tool is dumbed down enough to be mastered by those who haven't learned primary colors or geometric shapes yet, this insanity will continue.

Look at Youtube's recent redesign moves for example. They recommend the video you watched yesterday again and do so for weeks. The only people that want that are under the age of 6 who watch videos on loops. I'm confident they have strong empirical data mixed with the failure to properly segment users to back this decision up. Toddlers are controlling the direction of software and it needs to stop.

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

#593

Post by ianamartin »

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…

This thread contains many examples of professional technologists who don't know what a URL is. You, for example, don't seem to know what a URL is.

I guarantee you, most non-tech people don't know what a URL is. People know what links are, to the extent that they can click/tap on them to get to some thing, or copy them and share/email them. That's not the same as knowing what they are.

You're making a dangerous assumption about what people know, including yourself.

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

#594

Post by pvorb »

waterhouse wrote: post #583
pvorb wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about displaying an identicon, that is rendered from the domain, in the address bar? People might soon learn what the icons of their important sites look like and will easily detect if somebody is trying to phish their bank account.

The space of easily visually distinguishable images has a certain size. Let's assume there's a deterministic, pseudorandom mapping from domains to images. For a given domain, how many plausible impostor domains are there? What's the chance that there's at least one impostor domain that happens to get the same image? If you have 1000 distinct images, but a given domain has 5 letters that could each be replaced with an…

Yes, I admit it's hard to get something like this secure. It's in the same problem space like hash functions and might require some research.

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

#595

Post by jsjohnst »

abalone wrote: post #531
stcredzero wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read the linked bug report. Concrete examples were given. A super glaring one to me is that:

m.tumblr.com IS NOT a mobile version of tumblr.com

If I tried, I could likely come up with a ton more, but so could you if you tried.

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

#597

Post by hegz »

ozfive wrote: post #43

This and many other changes over a course of a short period of time have caused me to go to Firefox exclusively now. I heard Firefox is going to stop third party cookie tracking altogether. Why not give Google the big finger and use a different browser? Vote with your cold hard actions if you feel so strongly about something.

Been using Firefox on my desktop and its amazing. For some reason the mobile version is incredibly slow to load pages though.

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

#599

Post by hmage »

jeena wrote: post #486
Spivak wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother with URL language? It should just be 'Google Search' in the bar and you can see the URL if you want.

I have many websites which I don't let Google to index, how would my users access them?

If you're not in Google's index, then it's likely you're not in Google's interest to use Google's product to visit your site, since the company prefers if you use their search rather than type links directly or follow links from other links, hence they want to kill the URL — https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

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

#600

Post by [deleted] »

masswerk wrote: post #414
Donzo wrote: 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?

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