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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?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Monday December 16 2019, @12:29AM (7 children)
That's been driving me nuts as well, it's gone from "find pages with the terms you've listed" to "find pages that may contain some of the most popular/paid-for terms you've listed, but often contain zero instances of the other terms which zero in on the results you want". This often results in having to go multiple rounds of trial-and-error to figure out how to get Google to return the results you actually want, not the results Google wants to show you.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday December 16 2019, @01:06AM (5 children)
At some point, it might be less frustrating to use a different search engine like duckduckgo. Sure it will be different at first, but for me, after using DDG for several years, it is google that is unfamiliar and strange looking.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Monday December 16 2019, @01:57AM (2 children)
I use DDG on my laptop/desktop, but on Android devices it's a bit trickier to get away from Google everything as the default. Sure, you can run a third-party browser to get away from the built-in one or Chrome, but by default anything that searches for anything on Android inevitably winds up going to Google.
Another mild problem with DDG is that it sometimes misses stuff that Google gets, so it's a bit of guesswork as to whether you want to keep scrolling down DDG results or switch to Google in case that gets stuff DDG won't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @04:27AM (1 child)
Install IceCat. You can use your favorite Firefox plugins on your android devics. So much nicer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @07:54PM
I thought IceCat was unmaintained after Mozilla changed the branding requirements. Or, as it does look fairly well looked after by GNU, am I thinking of something else?
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday December 16 2019, @03:14PM
No doubt
With noscript blocking scripting, duck duck go works mostly the same as with it. Looks a little different, but a small compromise since overall it works fine. Sometimes I just permit scripts anyway. Sometimes they have hooha that pops up to self-promote, but that's about it that I've seen (maybe my other blocking prevents other advertising, I haven't looked into it).
With noscript blocking scripting on google's search engine, it shows like it is designed for a small phone on my 4k desktop monitor, and yields mostly sponsored results that are formatted for a phone with a small resolution. Like 600x800 instead of 800x600, on a 4k screen.
Not only is that strange looking, it is not very useful.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday December 16 2019, @06:17PM
duckduckgo is the Google of yesteryear. Hopefully, they don't go down the same rabbit hole that Google went down.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday December 16 2019, @06:48AM
Following up to my own post, I must say that DDG has been slowly succumbing to the Google brain rot in the last year or two, possibly due to taking results from Google or Google-fed sources. Try searching, for example, for _Requires_lock_held_ (a Windows SDK annotation) on Google and DDG. With Google, it actually produces relevant results while with DDG the third result already contains no mention of _Requires_lock_held_ anywhere on the page.