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Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

bleepingcomputer.com

71–80 of 194 posts

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#72
post #28

What a slippery slope. I imagine a future when the entire URL itself has disappeared and we live in some sort of Google-controlled walled garden environment, like what they're trying to do with AMP[0]. Some sites only work with WWW prefixed as the APEX DNS record is misconfigured and points to nothing. I've even seen some sites point to `0.0.0.0' but had a CNAME record for WWW and I could then view the site. [0] http…

Then these websites are broken and needs to be fixed. In the end, the most of the people would probably search for it in the first place.

broken according to who, exactly?

It's entirely reasonable to choose to host http/https traffic on a www subdomain and host entirely different services at the non-www domain.

The internet is not just http traffic. Full fucking stop.

There are plenty of systems and industries where the actual web front-end is an after-thought.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#73

Google wants nobody to know URLs exist, and that everyone is forced to search Google for everything, even sites they know, and there visit fake AMP-sites portraying to be from a server they are not, all while Google tracks every single keystroke you make. This is just another tiny step in that overall plan, and it is 100% evil. Don’t waste your time trying to talk the Chrome-team into reason. You are not their custom…

>iPhones yeah, if you don't like this change switch to a browser that has behaved this way for years

From the company whose mobile line of business started with an music player that hid file extensions. I can still remember when I first started running into people that didn't know that the songs on their ipod were files. Certainly builds a "moat."

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#74
post #55

I would have no trouble with hiding " https://" in the address bar, as long they show it for other protocols (including http). It might help move us to a world with https everywhere even faster. I still prefer Firefox: protocol, subdomains and path are greyed out but still clearly legible. This way I can eyeball "on which site am I?" quickly (and read google-secure-payments.google.via.net as via.net for example) and…

It seems that Firefox stopped copying http:// (when I want to copy URL) which is very annoying to me.

I need the whole address when copying.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#75
A coworker and me got bit by this just today.

I introduced him to a new tool I built for internal development, and wanted him to access the locally running instance of our codebase.

Took us some time to figure out that chrome was trying to connect to https:// instead of http://, which wasn't enabled. I think it said something in the error message about that, but who reads these anyways.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#76
I work for well-known tech company [redacted] and visiting our website with the www omitted does not work from within our network. But if you've just updated Chrome, it would now be unclear whether you typed the site name right.

My previous employer [redacted] had its marketing site on www and actual SaaS application product on www-less. Again a case where mis-typing would be made more confusing by Chrome.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#77

I work for well-known tech company [redacted] and visiting our website with the www omitted does not work from within our network. But if you've just updated Chrome, it would now be unclear whether you typed the site name right. My previous employer [redacted] had its marketing site on www and actual SaaS application product on www-less. Again a case where mis-typing would be made more confusing by Chrome.

Those both seem like implementation issues.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#78
post #45
post #38

This reminds me of how Windows frustratingly hides file extensions by default. This sounds low-upside/high-downside to me, but it's the sort of thing with simple arguments-for (easier for clueless users! Cleaner!), and nuanced arguments-against (eliding rarely-useful details in special cases causes ambiguity, and can lead to confusion is some cases, particularly for clueless users).

Finder on macOS does this too. It's maddening... There was an article recently about "hostile architecture" and this is similarly a "hostile software design" to prevent users from doing something the developers don't want them to do.

Oh macOS is worse. It shows or hides extensions based on whether the user chose to include it in the save box or not. Command-line apps' output will always have the extension included.

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#79
post #77

I work for well-known tech company [redacted] and visiting our website with the www omitted does not work from within our network. But if you've just updated Chrome, it would now be unclear whether you typed the site name right. My previous employer [redacted] had its marketing site on www and actual SaaS application product on www-less. Again a case where mis-typing would be made more confusing by Chrome.

Those both seem like implementation issues.

They're not good practice on the part of the website operators, for sure, but they are real examples of the root and www domains being different. In my experience there are also lots of old or government sites that just plain don't work without the www.

And when the person phones up tech support “ma'am, does it show the www. in front of the website?” “no” “sorry you need to retype” “it still doesn't show www.” is going to happen.

Or someone will write down the URL from the screen, and when someone else types it in, it won't work.

Oh, right, and there's the same issue with sites where https:// has a different site to http://!

Re: Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again

#80
post #6

URLs represent and identify content,controling them means you control content. In the short term these changes mean little but in the long term this will benefit google immensely. Google just loves slippery slopes. Identity and payment are extremely important to any ordered system of social interaction. More than content itself,controlling them helps one control everything else. I am trying hard to avoid believing co…

> Maybe a legal requirement for intetnet standards compliance makes sense?

there is no internet standard for how a URL should be displayed in a browser.

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