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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: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday December 16 2019, @03:09PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Monday December 16 2019, @03:09PM (#932860)

    yeah I disagree with them.

    the 'trivial' aspect of an FQDN is supposed to, you know, be the host name.

    The server. so what if they farmed it and a standard name of WWW was used? They trivialized the entire world wide web in doing this.

    Sounds to me like its a move more to keep traffic in their ecosystem. Dumb it down and make it hard to figure out what is talking to where and it becomes that much harder to... do whatever it is a user would want to do that involves choice and preferences.

    Hiding that info makes it harder to block as well; maybe they are going to start using a bunch of random names for different services and it all looks quite alarming to see alkjdalsd.google.com instead www.google.com. I mean, you know you're in trouble most of the time when a browser redirects to some shady sounding site in the url bar.

    I guess the real test is to see if only www is hidden or if all the domain prefixes are hidden as well.

    I still prefer to see the protocol info at the head of the URL I am connecting to, but maybe that is because I want to know what my PC is doing.

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