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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: 4, Informative) by EvilSS on Sunday December 15 2019, @08:22PM (4 children)

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 15 2019, @08:22PM (#932464)
    But the requested host name isn't changed. It's only not displaying it when the user isn't actively in the address bar. It still sends it in the host name and saves it in favorites. I agree it's a dumb change but it doesn't work the way you seem to think it does.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @10:50PM (#932516)

    I think you are missing the point. You cannot tell, at a glance, if you are looking at a web page provided by the official NTP pool project or a web page provided by a random person with a multi-use server. In addition, how many random people would even realize that clicking and then scrolling the url in the bar to the left would show something different?

    • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday December 16 2019, @02:56PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 16 2019, @02:56PM (#932854)
      No, you are expanding the OP's point to try to make yours. Like I said, it's a dumb idea but it won't break the request headers like the OP tried to imply it would.

  • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday December 15 2019, @11:30PM (1 child)

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Sunday December 15 2019, @11:30PM (#932535) Journal

    When I checked, the two addresses would load identical webpages, but www.pool.ntp.org has a consistent DNS address of 151.101.190.217 while pool.ntp.org really is returning completely different DNS addresses each time it's accessed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @12:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @12:05AM (#932551)

      Yeah, GP should try it himself and look at the PTRs and ASNs. That will make crystal clear you are getting the random machines from the pool. The reason why www.pool.ntp.org is consistent is because it is the deprecated URL for the NTP pool project, and therefore controlled by the NTP project through their CDN. There is no guarantee that the page you get from pool.ntp.org matches www.pool.ntp.org because it isn't under the pool project's control. In fact, most servers you contact at pool.ntp.org won't run web servers at all, or redirect you out of courtesy (which is why you did, because the browser probably tried a couple of the addresses returned until one responded with a redirect). But that isn't a hard requirement nor can the NTP pool guarantee it.