Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

bugs.chromium.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 919 posts

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

#811

Post by wazoox »

usaar333 wrote: post #804
dTal wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about the 'm.domain' convention; it's good and useful. I like the ability to retrieve a mobile site on my desktop, and vice versa. Sometimes I'll be on a site that's difficult to read on mobile, and speculatively try the 'm.domain' - often it will work. When the site itself tries to autodetect what device I'm using, it often makes a poor decision that is not subject to appeal.

On the downside, the m subdomain makes for terrible social media posting. E.g. a commenter using Wikipedia's mobile site posts a link to said page and desktop viewers are unexpectedly taken to the mobile, not desktop, page.

And Google decision makes it even worse by making the incorrect display incomprehensible.

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

#812

Post by Yizahi »

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.

Older people care more about consistency than "usability". They can successfully complete long tasks, maybe with several retries but they can, but if they are consistent. Input a long text somewhere, dial 15-20 digit phone number etc. But they can't usually deal with unpredictable situations, where computer will "intelligently" help them, fill parts of the input, when same action is different on different devices, when they need to know how system will behave in advance.

PS: consider how you would guide an older person over the phone when he/she is accessing Citibank website (for which www.citibank is different website), with Chrome will "intelligently" hide essential part of the address.

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

#813

Post by boomlinde »

Yokohiii wrote: post #735
crazygringo wrote: post #356

Safari already hides "www.". In fact it hides everything except the root-level domain, e.g. " https://www.google.com/about/" shows just "[lock] google.com". Firefox and Opera show the full domain but gray out everything in the entire URL except the root-level domain, so "www." is gray. Just saying, de-emphasizing and hiding parts of the URL is clearly a trend. This isn't just a Google thing.

There is quite a bit confusion how it actually works, nobody seems to had a look at it. Chrome simply hides the subdomain if the url bar is not in edit mode, these parts are still accessible/editable and the http host behaves (and is recovered from history) as before. Copying the url works as expected. It is still confusing for tech people, because we often need awareness where we are.

It seems like it would be confusing for anyone. Especially that it doesn't just remove the lowest level domain if it's www, but any part if it's www. So "www.paypal.www.com" would be displayed as "paypal.com". If that isn't great for phishing I don't know what is.

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

#814

Post by andrewaylett »

foozed wrote: post #776
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.

I use Firefox as my "at home" / private browser. However for work i unfortunately feel forced to continue using chrome. First I just really prefer the chrome devtools and i just can't seem top find an equivalent replacement for the "manage people"/multi user built ion function that chrome offers. I really wish Firefox had something similar...

Multi-Account Containers do that part for me, and I find them much nicer than Chrome's similar functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...

For bonus fun, also install Temporary Containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

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

#815

Post by redleggedfrog »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #421
redleggedfrog wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.

I don't want anything about the Internet to be like television, and while I know you're trying to make an analogous statement I think the real threats to freedom on the Internet are coming from entrenched interests who would take what you say literally.

I am being literal. The internet is not about freedom. It's about making money and influencing thought and action.

Realize that the majority (and I'm willing to say probably over 95%) of people today us the internet on their phone. They have a few "apps" which they switch through by swiping left or right (changing channels). The use Facebook, Amazon, their chosen politically aligned news site, Google search, and a few other things. Probably not much more than the 6 channels of TV I had as a kid.

And the Google searches are rarely if ever for anything beyond the first few links or the sponsored content. Really, page 2 and beyond might as well not exist. The users don't go there. Google could just return results from major organizations and users would be fine with it.

I lived through PC era, from start to finish. It took me a long time, but eventually I realized that 99% of the population was never going to understand how computers work. Just the concept of a file and a folder is beyond most people (that's why phones don't have them). Once I gave up on expecting people to learn about computers, computing became much easier. Phones, tablets, and so on, for the masses, the desktop for me. And now I didn't have to go fix peoples screwed up computers - they don't have them anymore.

The importance of a domain name, much less a sub-domain, is now irrelevant. A search result, of of the first few, is what matters. You will never get users to understand a URL.

At one time the internet might have been for us hackers, but that time has passed. It's now the domain of the masses.

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

#816

Post by eadmund »

floatingatoll wrote: post #380
nichochar wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is actually the main reason I cannot use Safari. It always boggled my mind that they made this decision. For power users, they never look at the url unless they want information from it, in which case the `www` is valuable. For low tech users, it can lead to straight up incomprehensible issues, like sites not rendering properly (think of a `m.*`). The UI gains are so small, that part of the screen is never reall…

Low-tech users don’t often understand that a difference could possibly exist between “m.” and “www.” at all. However, if it shows the TLD, they can confirm it says “google.com”. Imagine they’re visiting a Paypal phishing link, to the domain: www.paypal.com.www.com The most important thing to show the user is “www.com”, because they’re expecting “paypal.com”. All the rest is nonessential for protecting users from bad…

> Low-tech users don’t often understand that a difference could possibly exist between “m.” and “www.” at all.

They should. Children probably have difficulty with '6' vs. '9,' but they need to learn in order to use our number system. Likewise, users of the Internet need to learn the domain name system. Could there be better name systems? Sure. There could be better number systems, too, but this is what we have for now.

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

#817

Post by inetknght »

jake_the_third wrote: post #690
inetknght wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you count only the people who require tech support then of course you're only going to see the people who require tech support. But they're not the only users. Developers and techies are users too and they're much less likely to call tech support in general. This harms them far more than it helps the people who need help.

And this move was made under the guise of improving ux for normal users and not users who know how subdomains work. What's the point you're trying to make?

As a user who's harmed by this, how do I disable it?

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

#818

Post by Ajedi32 »

sam_goody wrote: post #741

Most comments assume that this is for solving user confusion, or security, or building a better URL scheme, et al. It's not, that is all smokescreen. As ivs wrote[1] They are going to hide amp subdomain, so you don't know if you're looking at AMP or the actual destination. And then suddenly the whole world funnels through AMP. And for that reason, it won't be reversed until people call them for what they are actually…

Yeah... no. That's just baseless FUD.

They _are_ indeed planning to get rid of AMP cache URLs, but they'll be doing it through open W3C standards anyone can use, not through special-casing their own domains: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-usi...

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

#819

Post by Ajedi32 »

normo12 wrote: post #799

Suddenly "www.com"'s value has skyrocketed in the eyes of scammers. How about: * login. .www.com -> login. .com * members. .www.com -> members. .com Even some carefully chosen .www.com's will now be valuable: * login.www. .www.com -> login. .com What a stupid idea...

That's just a bug which I'm sure will be fixed in the next release.

For this to actually help scammers (after the bug is fixed) they'd need to own www.example.com but not example.com, which is unlikely to say the least.

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

#820

Post by Ajedi32 »

fireattack wrote: post #99

I'm ok with hiding "www.", but it also hides "m." which is sometimes very confusing (I once opened a m.facebook.com link and was very puzzled why it uses the mobile site when the URl bar just shows "facebook.com").

Looks like they're only going to be hiding `m.` on mobile. On desktop it will still show by default.
Post reply on HN