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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

#151
post #30

This is idiotic and harmful. We already lost information about the protocol, because somebody believed it is "too complex" for users. Now we're losing other parts of the URL. It's making a joke of the SSL/TLS padlock, too — what exactly is the padlock supposed to tell me? It used to signify that a "known authority" certified that I'm connected to whatever I see in the URL bar. But now that browsers take liberties wit…

It's a sign that the Chrome team is too large and should be assigned more meaningful work.

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

#152
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the principle. www is a valid subdomain. Browsers are supposed to be as unopinionated as possible since they are browsers , not mediators, and their job is to implement the standards of the web.

You want your browser to show unlimited popup windows too?

No, but I want my browser to notify me that its blocking popups rather than just hiding them from me entirely and assuming I never wanted to see them anyway.

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

#153
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the principle. www is a valid subdomain. Browsers are supposed to be as unopinionated as possible since they are browsers , not mediators, and their job is to implement the standards of the web.

> their job is to implement the standards of the web. Is there a standard saying how the URL should be displayed in the toolbar?

Verbatim 1.0

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

#154
post #12

Yo, this is... going too far, c'mon now. While sure, www seems odd now, it's still a subdomain and we're inching into territory of obscuring things that matter for small gains in end-user perception that aren't _that_ impactful.

Yeah this is weird. Which users are bothered enough by the leading www enough to justify messing with semantics?

I'm guessing it's related to mobile. Limited real estate means removing www gives you 3 more characters on the end of the url.

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

#155
post #5

...I'm okay with this, I think. Has www (http over tcp/ip) not become the default protocol for "the internet" in the average person's mind?

www is a sub domain and orthogonal to protocol. Eg ftp://www.yo.com should be valid as well.

And in the other direction too, for instance http://ftp.debian.org/

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

#156
post #30

This is idiotic and harmful. We already lost information about the protocol, because somebody believed it is "too complex" for users. Now we're losing other parts of the URL. It's making a joke of the SSL/TLS padlock, too — what exactly is the padlock supposed to tell me? It used to signify that a "known authority" certified that I'm connected to whatever I see in the URL bar. But now that browsers take liberties wit…

You can still click and see the whole URL. This is just making it easier for the average user to see the most important thing to them, which is the domain name. It's not like they're just changing stuff randomly. The TLS padlock change has been going on for a while now, and not without reason. As we get to a point where almost everything is served over TLS it doesn't make sense to tell the user every time. It makes m…

Clicking doesn't reveal the URL. You have to click and use the left arrow key, at which point the protocol and www prefix appear.

Just like when Chrome hid the protocol part of the URL, you can even click in the URL bar and copy it without seeing the protocol (or, now, www prefix) at all. I think it results in a confusing experience when you paste it. (Ordinary users will say: "I copied example.com but I pasted https://www.example.com … why??)

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing jwr's point. He's arguing that this is harmful for users, especially the ones who don't know what the words mean. If I were solving this, I'd instead push to eliminate "www" altogether, not sweep it under the rug. It was useful circa 1996, when users might plausibly be using something other than the WWW with a browser. But it has become entirely vestigial.

Why not drop .com then as well? Most sites are on .com domains after all. It is exactly the same issue. A domain is a domain. Google is arbitrarily dictating your CNAME from the user's perspective. What if you don't serve your site off of mysite.com is google going to automatically try again at www.mysite.com? What if you have distinct content at both domains? This decision is stupid.

[deleted]

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

#158
the amount of assumptions that browsers make nowadays is really getting out of hand.

Chrome on my work laptop doesn't even bother resolving a name that certainly does not look like an url but exists in the network.

Instead it will look it up on (guess what?) Google.

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

#159

Have any of you with corporate-type proxies been seeing authentication issues? Since moving to Chrome 69 a number of our users are reporting repeated proxy auth prompts when this should normally be handled transparently by Kerberos.

Yes, Chrome 69 has a bug with Kerberos:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not drop .com then as well? Most sites are on .com domains after all. It is exactly the same issue. A domain is a domain. Google is arbitrarily dictating your CNAME from the user's perspective. What if you don't serve your site off of mysite.com is google going to automatically try again at www.mysite.com? What if you have distinct content at both domains? This decision is stupid.

It's not the same issue at all, in that domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people. If you have an example of somebody who needs to serve different web content for foo.com and www.foo.com, I look forward to seeing it. But I've never seen one, and when I've seen it happen accidentally it's due to idiocy.

> while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people

Sometimes. Far from always.

In some environments, `www` may be under an entirely different administrative domain, with lesser authority than the top level domain which is delegating web services to the `www` group by way of creating a dns record and/or adding an http(s) redirect to the parent domain.

Having some string values arbitrarily considered trivial is dangerous.

See: lbl.gov has address 128.3.41.146 vs www.lbl.gov has address 35.196.135.136

The root domain points to hosts at the lab. The subdomain has been delegated off to Google.

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