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Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2018 5:33 pm
by FlyingPenguin
Chrome 69 kills off www in URLs: Here's why Google's move has made people angry
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-69 ... ple-angry/

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2018 10:33 pm
by Losbot
Annoying!
Thanks for the info. I like to know the sub-domain, regardless of what Google might think.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 5:33 am
by psypher
Losbot wrote:Annoying!
Thanks for the info. I like to know the sub-domain, regardless of what Google might think.
Why? Seriously, I'd like to know. It's not about removing all sub-domains. For me, having every website with www seems pointless in this day and age.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 6:30 am
by FlyingPenguin
I like to see the whole thing. I equate it to hiding file extensions. It's not just www - it's any subdomain Chrome considers 'trivial'.

There are also security concerns, some pointed out in the article. For instance, some companies don't own their m. subdomain.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:37 am
by Genom
And just this morning my wife was freaking out because chrome updated, then hid the www on her website, and popped up a message about synching information and she freaked the fuck out because it was her work email and she had no clue what was happening thinking someone was stealing her info.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 9:59 am
by psypher
FlyingPenguin wrote:I like to see the whole thing. I equate it to hiding file extensions. It's not just www - it's any subdomain Chrome considers 'trivial'.
Ok, I think that's going a little overboard. Other, actual subdomains aren't trivial and aren't going to be removed. www is definately trivial and in 2018 there's no way anyone can argue with a straight face that www is NOT trivial. There's been addons available for years now that remove the www. It's 2018. It really is pointless for the main domain. In case you don't see where I'm going with all this, my issue is more with people saying it's not trivial. I think the real issue, which I 100% agree with, is the fact that it was enabled by default instead of letting the user know and letting them make the choice.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 10:12 am
by psypher
FlyingPenguin wrote:There are also security concerns, some pointed out in the article. For instance, some companies don't own their m. subdomain.
For example, m.tumblr.com, which is not Tumblr's site, is shown as tumblr.com, and it's not
Whoa...ok so, I don't use tumblr so I couldn't tell you what I'm looking at, but how could the owner of a domain NOT own the subdomain. They may run different sites (I don't know why), but they are definitely the owner. m subdomains are for the mobile version of the domain. If someone decided to use it for something else, where that's their problem for doing something outside the norm/standard.

and it's not immediately clear that http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://www.pool.ntp.org
That's a typo, it's supposed to be http://www.pool.ntp.org vs http://pool.ntp.org. I forget the exact history of their domain names, but I can tell you www.pool.ntp.org doesn't exist. They redirect to the correct domain which is www.ntppool.org or ntpool.org. The pool subdomains is for the pool of NTP servers.

Re: Chrome 69 hides the http://www - there's a flag to turn it back on

Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 10:28 am
by FlyingPenguin
Another thing: While it's common to own both www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com, that wasn't always the case (I remember having to separately buy them for some of my earliest websites). And to this day there are still some misconfigured servers out there that won't automatically forward you from one to the other (up until just last year irs.gov was a dead site that would not automatically forward to www.irs,gov - I kid you not, drove me nuts as I use that site to test opening PDF documents in a browser on client PCs), so your average person might sit there at wonder why they can't get to a site, when the domain looks okay in the URL bar.

I admit, it's less of an issue than it used to be, and in the case of small screen tablets or 2-in-1s it would save screen real estate, but I also don't like the idea of dumbing down the UI for the benefit of the user. Users (even noobs) SHOULD be used to seeing the whole address IMO.

But, on the other hand, I'm okay with it as long as they leave a switch in there for people like me who want to see the whole URL.