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Google Achieves Its Goal of Erasing the WWW Subdomain from Chrome

posted by martyb on Sunday December 15 2019, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-it-easy-for-fake-sites dept.

Fnord666 writes:

Google Achieves Its Goal of Erasing the WWW Subdomain From Chrome

With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.

When Chrome 76 was released, Google decided to no longer show the www "trivial subdomain" in the address bar when visiting a web site. This means, that if you are visiting www.bleepingcomputer.com, Chrome would only show bleepingcomputer.com in the address bar...

[...] According to a Google engineer, www is considered a trivial subdomain because "this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases".

Many users, though, felt that this was a security issue, could be confusing for users, and is technically incorrect because www.domain.com is not always the same host as domain.com.

So is this a distinction without a difference or a real issue?

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @04:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @04:32PM (#932404)

    Ewww. The worst thing here is that I think you're are almost certainly correct.

    I imagine what they'll do is translate e.g. a search for 'chess' into chess.google-internet.com where .google-internet.com is also removed. If the site exists the user simply goes to a site who's url would be shown as "chess". If the site doesn't exist, they are instead directed to Google search. And so if a site owner wants the ultimate search-engine-optimization (which is to by pass them altogether!) then he has to sign into the google world.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @04:38PM (#932407)

    Even more compelling on top of this is that this would also screw with any user who tried to use a different browser.

    For instance a low information user who is accustomed to being able to go to the "news" website, or "channel8", or "weather" or whatever else would suddenly find their search would simply be directed to a search engine where they may not immediately find what they were looking for. This other browser is so broken, back to Chrome they go.