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

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: 2, Disagree) by FatPhil on Monday December 16 2019, @01:04AM (4 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday December 16 2019, @01:04AM (#932581) Homepage
    > They are literally two different and valid names.
    > server.example and www.server.example can be two different servers.

    Noone is saying otherwise. That doesn't make the distinction one that is useful to exercise. And if it's not useful, it's useless.

    > For example, one could be your internal webserver, another your domain controller.

    What should an outsider expect to see when pointing his browser to server.example?
    If you answer anything apart from "the company website", then you've lost a customer.
    However, I said that above, so you're obviously clue-resistant.

    I will confess to serving different content on the "www." adorned versions of one of my domains, for 25 years now. It was a pisstake page to punish the visitor for using the utterly pointless, and never otherwise used, adornment. It's clearly taken google 25 years to catch on to the idea. (However, their response is retarded).
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @04:48AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @04:48AM (#932693)

    An outsider shouldn't expect to see anything because not all addressable names are in the form of domain.example, not all names in the form domain.example have servers, not all servers are web servers, and not all web servers are public servers.

    Plus, sometimes losing a customer who doesn't know the difference or showing different content is a feature, which you so elegantly illustrated yourself.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 16 2019, @12:46PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday December 16 2019, @12:46PM (#932818) Homepage
      Completely disagree, but I'm out of modpoints, as there's been an invasion of trolls today.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday December 16 2019, @11:56AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 16 2019, @11:56AM (#932801) Journal

    That doesn't make the distinction one that is useful to exercise.

    Why is "useful to exercise" even remotely relevant? The distinction between driving on the left versus right is not useful to exercise until you run into someone driving down the same side of the road. The point is that these can be very different and break the user experience for no valid reason (it doesn't help the users and it doesn't respect web standards). Google has just created an enormous headache for their own purposes.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 16 2019, @12:44PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday December 16 2019, @12:44PM (#932816) Homepage
      > Why is "useful to exercise" even remotely relevant?

      Because that is the point that is being debated. I.e. it's totally relevant, and the only thing that's relevant, in this subthread.
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