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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

#461

Post by Donzo »

LocalH wrote: post #452
Donzo wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked article: "I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now," says Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome. "But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, bec…

They seem to view the Internet as their platform, given the way they like to bully the tech sphere.

Their dominance has become problematic when they entertain concepts like this seriously. They are really growing into the monolith that we all feared.

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

#462

Post by kristopolous »

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 to https, failing to do the SSL handshake because of course it's port 80. Adding the protocol and the port isn't enough of a hint that I know what I'm trying to do.

What's worse, this is a domain-wide setting. If you have say, local.example.com, the browser will try to protect you again.

You have to go to an obscure preference and make the browser forget about this on a domain-by-domain basis, which will reset the next time it gets a wildcard SSL cert for the domain.

This thing is of the same vain, it's the new Ctrl-Q of the browser world; a feature that, due to some dogmatic ideology, doesn't have a "knock off the bullshit" setting.

Somehow irreversibly child-proofing software by making it not do what you tell it and hide important details has become fashionable, it's nonsense and needs to stop.

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

#464

Post by CmdrKrool »

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 tell them, "that is the address of the page, and that will always lead to the exact same place if you type it fully and correctly, and that's that". Instead I have to get my head around what if they're using browser X or operating system Y, I have to ask on the phone first, "hang on, tell me what you see on your screen", I have to say to the lady who's eagerly sat in front of me with pen hovered above paper waiting for me to dictate how to do a thing in straightforward steps, "well it depends, first you have to check this thing, and if it's like this then you can do this but it might also be like that in which case it's a bit different, let me explain" - and this is usually the point at which the non-technical user gets tired and throws the book at me.

In short, I think consistency of information and process is usually much more understandable and useful to users of any level, than the dumb 'simplification' of this half-baked information-hiding.

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

#465

Post by masswerk »

Donzo wrote: post #459
masswerk wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Their complexity makes them a security hazard." GTFOH! HANDS OFF!

Notably, what is the common answer to a system regarded to be too complex to be handled on a general level, so that it may be considered a common risk? Authority (read, trusted man in the middle).

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

#466

Post by nixpulvis »

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…

No this is Google (and others) attempting to fix confusion caused by developers making systems that are hard to understand for users. Nothing is stopping developers from redirecting or setting up DNS to make the two domains go to the same place.

I personally feel like any negative user experience should be addressed by the developers of the website, not the browser.

Meanwhile I'm sure there are people out there who want to maintain a distinction between www.x.y and just x.y.

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

#467

Post by ryandrake »

wpietri wrote: post #442
ryandrake wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, www.example.com and example.com can differ in terms of IP address, underlying hardware, actual website content, and probably other things I don’t know. They are different URLs. It seems problematic to assume they are the same.

Not at all. People already assume they are the same. And they have for 20 years. Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. Anybody clueful redirects one to the other. The only reason they're separate is that a) the web wasn't dominant when it was introduced, and b) technology of the time made it hard to manage traffic in ways we can now.

> Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs.

The third and ninth comments in the linked bug present real world examples of this behavior.

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

#468

Post by wingworks »

hrez wrote: post #434
DougBTX wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first citibank url doesn’t load for me, so it is site vs not site rather than two different sites, and both those ntp urls are redirecting me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ - perhaps there’s less substance than meets the eye to those complaints.

user1 - https://citibank.com.sg doesn't work for me user2 - it's fine, here is a screenshot of it working (while showing "beautified" https://www.citibank.com.sg ) how is that not confusing?

I think it's more on the website owners to fix their sites, users expect domain.com to be the same/auto-redirected to www.domain.com or vice versa. I think it's a good thing what Chrome is doing, it will push website owners to correctly set up their domain redirects and in the end, lessen end-user confusion.

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

#469

Post by jwilk »

parliament32 wrote: post #361
_wmd wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is this decision is driven somewhere by marketing morons who want 'www.google' (presumably a domain that will at some point exist, the TLD already does) to render as simply 'google'

Technically there's no reason why a TLD can't have an A record. If they own "google." they can point it to whatever address and serve whatever they want.

Dotless domains are prohibited for new gTLDs:

https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en

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

#470

Post by zbentley »

feross wrote: post #458
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…

This change goes far beyond merely hiding the "www." prefix. I'm not making up these examples: 1. "m.tumblr.com " and "tumblr.com " are BOTH displayed as "tumblr.com" even though they're literally different sites. 2. "www.example.www.example.com" displays as "example.example.com" which means all "www" subdomains, whether leading or not are being stripped out. 3. In the extreme case, "www.m.www.m.example.com" shows up…

If true, that's seriously concerning from a "detecting visual-similarity domain hijacking" security perspective.
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