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Making Browsers Honor the DNS SearchDomain?

Posted by Cliff on from the making-local-addresses-work-like-they-should dept.

Craig A. Smith asks: "I've always been able to use simply 'http://www' to get to my company's web site, presumably because my default search domain was 'mycompany.com.' Suddenly my browser started taking me to 'www.www.com' instead. This happened simultaneously in all browsers (tested Mozilla, IE, NS4.7 and NS7.0) an two platforms (RedHat7.2 and Win2k). The odd thing is the command 'nslookup www' (or dig or host) behaves as desired and still resolves to www.mycompany.com so I don't think this is a DNS issue. I've tried various /etc/resolv.conf settings with no luck ('domain mycompany.com' and 'search mycompany.com'). How do I get my browser to apply the default domain before tacking on the www prefix and .com suffix?"

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Proxy? by skinfitz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You've just got a new web proxy haven't you?

  2. DCHP & Other Things by wdr1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are you using DHCP in Windows? That's the only thing I can think of that would cause all the applications to change at once.

    Linux side, I believe if you have 'domain' configured properly in /etc/resolve.conf you should be good to go. You mentioned nslookup works correctly, but does 'telnet www 80' take you to your originial site as well?

    A few other things:

    - Consider using keywords instead of relying upon DNS to do magic for you. Create a bookmark w/ your company's website & give it the keyword 'www'. That should fix you up. (Keywords are the most currently underrated feature in the browser. Especially in regards to their ability to do searches.)

    - You want to consider the above not only for convience, but also so your companies tracking doesn't get screwed up a little. When you hit the site with just 'www' (instead of 'www.foo.com') you drop your cookies. Most sites use cookies at least to track unique visitors if nothing else, and you're probably causing a minor bit of unintended cookie churn.

    - Another poster mentioned how browsers require neither 'http://', nor the trailing slash (e.g. on http://www.slashdot.org/). Defaulting to http probably isn't that bad. Especially inside a web browser. After all, it's highly unlikely the user intended gopher://. There is a difference on the trailing slash & it's better to include. If you try to hit a server w/o the trailing slash, you'll simply get a redirect from the server to the version *with* a slash. On broadband, it's totally trival, but for narrowband users, it is noticable. Something to worth keeping in mind for the URLs your link to.

    -Bill

    --
    SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
  3. IE does still require http:// at times by barzok · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've found that if you're using a site on anything but port 80, IE will choke trying to find it unless you prefix the URL with http://.

  4. How to do it: by GoRK · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the way to make pretty much any browser honor your search domain. This works in IE, Moz(win/linux), Opera (win/linux), Netscape:

    Type as: http://www/

    You can also try just typing www/ .. I seem to remember that that works in some of them.

    Also if you disable name completion which I know you can do in Opera (not sure about the others) then just plain www will work.

    Enjoy,

    ~GoRK