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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."
URLs should be displayed as they are, not interpreted, not dumbed down for dumb users, not altered in any way.
Anything else poses security risks to people who know what they're doing, and further enables absolute idiots who have no business being anywhere near a computer and are too stupid to figure out even the basics of how anything works. We all have enough trouble with those.
Speaking of idiots, in about 5 posts expect to see some moron trying to say this is all Donald Trump's fault since every other discussion around here seems to devolve into that.
The URL bar should display the URL.
The URL contains a domain. It should display that domain. There is no reason to lie about the location. It is important if I am at sub.domain.tld or domain.tld. Those are different locations, served, in theory, by different machines.
If something as simple as a "www" overwhelms you, please tell your legal guardian that you have an exacerbation, and maybe a computer has become too much for you entirely. You certainly won't be tying your own shoes anymore at that level of mental disability.
Google should PERMANENTLY stop fiddling with this bullshit. The thing in the address bar is not a aol or compuserve keyword. It's an URL, that's a protocol, a hostname, and then whatever random trash you need to feed the webmonkeys' infernal machine to give it what you want -- which might be a file name, lots of parameters, or whatever else. Trying to hide some part of it because it confuses the lusers will not un-confuse the lusers, they are permanently confused anyway. It will now also confuse the slightly-more-savvy, and annoy the experts.
I say we really ought've come up with a better interface than google, mozilla, or redmond, or really most everyone else "big", have managed so far. Something that Just Does Not Care about what lusers "think", but is straight-up clear and honest about the technical side of things. The absence of such a thing just goes to show that nobody knowledgeable is actually active in this space. Webmonkeying breeds webmonkeys. Whodathot.
Why change things all the time (and waste the users' time) when things don't get better? I.e., why not leave the URL alone?
simplifying the UI
How is removing information like www. a simplification of the user interface?
Doing so makes Chrome the Phisherman's friend. Pale Moon seems to be the only modern browser that has the courage to show the full url by default.
Hiding the subdomain opens the potential to make a user named "www.www" and be given the user-specific subdomain www.www.somesite.com, which then displays as www.somesite.com which will seem legitimate, and other dumb things.
www was never designed to have special privileges, so there's no protections in place to handle the basic stupid things that can happen when a browser decides to give it special treatment. Same goes for the "m" subdomain - sites have cheerfully been letting users create accounts with the username "m" and allocating them the m.site.com subdomain, because "m" doesn't mean anything special unless you decide to use it for something.
Remember when Microsoft decided it's users were just too bone headed to understand complicated extensions like .txt and .exe, so they hid them? And how they then wondered why people were happily clicking on invoice.doc.exe and costing the economy billions of dollars?
Google is the new Microsoft and they think everyone that isn't Google is stupid.
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.
I don't think this is really about “www” or “m”. It’s probably the first in a series of longer-term changes Google intends to make which benefits them more directly - perhaps by obscuring the fact that people are viewing pages through some custom Google domain, like AMP.
I suspect Google’s longer-term play is to somehow get people viewing the web but never actually leaving google.com - more or less adopting one of Facebook’s operational principles. But it starts with a relatively innocuous move like this one.
#DeleteChrome