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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @05:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @05:28PM (#932420)

    Observed behavior just now--I'm not normally a Chrome user, but have a copy for occasional use.

    1. Copied a full url of one of the pages of my company website from Firefox. This page is very simple read-only, HTML-only:
        http://www.mycompany.com/book.html [mycompany.com]

    Pasted into Chrome and it displays:
        mycompany.com/book.html

    I selected that URL (mycompany.com/book.html) and then hit the left arrow, thinking that I would try to add back in the "www." in front to see what happened. Surprise, the "www." is already there, just hiding to the left of the "left margin" of the address bar. However, the original http:// is nowhere to be found.

    2. This time I copied the URL from a different page, from Firefox, not copying this part "http://www."
        mycompany.com/program.html

    Pasted into Chrome and it goes to the correct page. Then selected the full address bar, hit left arrow and it added the "www." back on.

    3. A big company we work with sometimes distributes data files to a group of their customers by emailing out a URL that looks like this:
    ftp://ftp.bigcorp.com/dropfile/Identfier_random-text.zip [bigcorp.com]
    The data isn't super secret and they only leave the file up for a day or two (have to be quick to get it). Opening this in Firefox in a new tab starts the download automagically.

    4. Pasted that same URL ftp://ftp.bigcorp.com/dropfile/Identfier_random-text.zip [bigcorp.com] into Chrome and now the whole thing displays, starting correctly with "ftp://", nothing removed or hidden. I couldn't actually test for file download (there aren't any files posted at this time), but it looks like it should work.

    5. ???

    6. Profit!!