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Google Temporarily Brings Back the www In Chrome URLs -- But Should They? (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Digital Trends:
With the launch of Chrome 69, Google stunned users last week with a surprising decision to no longer display the "www" and "m" part of the URL in the Chrome search bar, but user backlash forced Google to soften its stance. Google's course reversal, although welcomed by users, is only short term, and the search giant said it will change course once again with the release of the Chrome 70 browser....
Critics have argued that by not displaying the special-case subdomains, it was harder for users to identify sites as legitimate, and the move could lead to more scams on the internet. Others go as far as questioning Google's motives for not displaying the "www" and "m" portion of a web address, and these users speculated that the move may be to disguise Google's AMP -- or Accelerated Mobile Pages -- subdomain to make it indistinguishable for the actual domain....
With the launch of Chrome 70, Google plans on hiding the 'www' portion of a web address inside the search bar, but it will continue to display the 'm' subdomain. "We are not going to elide 'm' in M70 because we found large sites that have a user-controlled 'm' subdomain," Google Chromium product manager Emily Schecter said. "There is more community consensus that sites should not allow the 'www' subdomain to be user controlled."
ZDNet notes that while Chrome's billion-plus users were surprised, "Apple's Safari likewise hides the www and m but it hasn't caused as much concern, likely because of Google's outsized influence over the web and Chrome's dominance of the browser market."
TechRepublic quotes a community feedback post that had argued that "Lying about the hostname to novices and power users alike in the name of simplifying the UI seems imprudent from a security perspective."
Critics have argued that by not displaying the special-case subdomains, it was harder for users to identify sites as legitimate, and the move could lead to more scams on the internet. Others go as far as questioning Google's motives for not displaying the "www" and "m" portion of a web address, and these users speculated that the move may be to disguise Google's AMP -- or Accelerated Mobile Pages -- subdomain to make it indistinguishable for the actual domain....
With the launch of Chrome 70, Google plans on hiding the 'www' portion of a web address inside the search bar, but it will continue to display the 'm' subdomain. "We are not going to elide 'm' in M70 because we found large sites that have a user-controlled 'm' subdomain," Google Chromium product manager Emily Schecter said. "There is more community consensus that sites should not allow the 'www' subdomain to be user controlled."
ZDNet notes that while Chrome's billion-plus users were surprised, "Apple's Safari likewise hides the www and m but it hasn't caused as much concern, likely because of Google's outsized influence over the web and Chrome's dominance of the browser market."
TechRepublic quotes a community feedback post that had argued that "Lying about the hostname to novices and power users alike in the name of simplifying the UI seems imprudent from a security perspective."
"With the launch of Chrome 70, Google plans on hiding the ‘www’ portion of a web address inside the search bar"
They are putting the 'm.' back in, not www. They are basing this on a rough idea of not knowing of a 'www.' that differs from the top level of a 'large' site, rather than some hard and fast rule.
The simple fact of the matter is it is a dumb idea. It doesn't make urls any friendlier (who in the world honestly believes that www. and m. are the thing that can make urls hard?), but it does potentially cause confusion.
As to calls of 'but Apple can...', the difference is that browser has less than 4% of the share of the desktop market, and those people are the unbelievably loyal to Apple. On the mobile browser, the url situation is already pretty useless given the limited screen real estate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually in the initial implementation they dropped www regardless of the location in the url.
So www.www.somesite.com became somesite.com
And google.www.com became google.com
Actually, some people do actually use Safari on the desktop, despite your claim. Personally there are aspects of the Chrome UI that I dislike and it was for sometime, a bit of a resource hog.
And the article is incorrect about safari dropping www. That happens often at the website level where the website itself redirects from www.domain to domain. That is not a function of the browser, the browser it following the re-direct and showing the correct data. www.cnn.com for example stays www.cnn.com. if I use the web shortcut from search, it usually goes to cnn.com, but that is the entry being supplied by search ( in this case google ), so again safari is working correctly.
www.slashtod.com redirects itself to slashdot.com or one of the many tech.slashdot.com sub headings on the domain. so again safari is working correctly.
Although it's common for www.mysite.com to be a CNAME for mysite.com, this is not always the case. This means Chrome might display the same URL for two different web pages.
Actually it is pretty annoying. Safari has an option in the application preferences advanced tab to turn this malfeature off.
However, although it shows the URL from the domain name forward, including the www. portion if present, it does not show the http:// portion.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
To the person at Google who stated that www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain":
In my experience, "www" is not typically a subdomain. It is a host name. For example, in your DNS you might have an A record that resolves "www" to the IP address of your web server, just as you might have an A record that resolves "ftp" to your FTP server, or whatever.
The interesting thing about DNS, however, is that you can create an A record for a subdomain. This means you can make the "www" part of a URL optional by having "www.mydomain.com" and "mydomain.com" resolve to the same IP address (or group of addresses).
So, Google, kindly do not fuck with my DNS naming preferences. When I pay to register a domain, that includes the right to determine what I do (and don't do) with the DNS for my domain. If I want to show "www" in my URLs, that's my bloody business, not yours.
An IP address does not identify a website. A DNS and cert does. IP address are meant to be assumed arbitrary when it comes to security, except root DNS and other such critical services.