Google Just Stopped Displaying 'www' and 'https' In Chrome's Address Bar (techrepublic.com) 185
"Google has finally chopped the 'www' from Chrome's address bar after delaying the controversial move due to a backlash," reports TechRepublic:
The move to remove 'www' was initially planned for last year, when Google announced it would cut "trivial subdomains" from the address bar in Chrome 69. Now Google has begun truncating the visible URL in Chrome for desktop and Android, rolling out the change in version 76 of the browser, released this week. By default sites in Chrome now no longer display the "https" scheme or the "www" subdomain, with the visible address starting after this point. To view the full URL, users now have to click the address bar twice on desktop and once on mobile. Google has argued the move is driven by a desire for greater simplicity and usability of Chrome...
However the announcement provoked a fresh wave of criticism, from those who say the move will confuse users and even potentially make it easier for them to inadvertently connect to fake sites... There are also some who claim Google's motivation in changing how the URL is displayed may be to make it harder for users to tell whether they are on a page hosted on Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages subdomain...
Google says it has also built a Chrome extension that doesn't obfuscate the URL to "help power users recognize suspicious sites and report them to Safe Browsing". Despite the backlash from some online, Chrome isn't the first browser to truncate the URL in this way, with Apple's Safari similarly hiding the full address.
However the announcement provoked a fresh wave of criticism, from those who say the move will confuse users and even potentially make it easier for them to inadvertently connect to fake sites... There are also some who claim Google's motivation in changing how the URL is displayed may be to make it harder for users to tell whether they are on a page hosted on Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages subdomain...
Google says it has also built a Chrome extension that doesn't obfuscate the URL to "help power users recognize suspicious sites and report them to Safe Browsing". Despite the backlash from some online, Chrome isn't the first browser to truncate the URL in this way, with Apple's Safari similarly hiding the full address.
Wow.. (Score:5, Insightful)
As if people needed another reason to use Firefox.
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As if people needed another reason to use Firefox.
Which browser I use depends entirely on which has the fewest and least severe memory leaks at the moment.
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>"Which browser I use depends entirely on which has the fewest and least severe memory leaks at the moment."
By that metric, you have probably been using Firefox for a long time now :)
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I've discovered to some surprise that the Debian stable elease of firefox is actually pretty stable. For a while I was struggling along with the regularly "updated" version of firefox, and it would regularly explode in resource usage until I had to do hard shut-downs to recover.
I was considering writing a daemon that would spy on my firefox and kill it if it's memory usage exceeded 50%-- but switching to stable was good enough.
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I've discovered to some surprise that the Debian stable elease of firefox is actually pretty stable. For a while I was struggling along with the regularly "updated" version of firefox, and it would regularly explode in resource usage until I had to do hard shut-downs to recover.
I was considering writing a daemon that would spy on my firefox and kill it if it's memory usage exceeded 50%-- but switching to stable was good enough.
I absolutely hate Chrome for all kinds of reasons. Remarkably the fact that is one of the most most successful mass surveillance tools of all time is not my biggest gripe though, it's memory leaks. On Linux even the stable Chrome versions leak so much memory that they bring the window manager on my gray box at work to a grinding halt unless I kill Chrome at least once a week. We tried using every major browser on the market on a set of small computers that basically boot straight into full screen browser mo
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All the browsers eventually completely locked up the PC on both Windows and Linux and requiring them to be rebooted regularly. Chrome was the single worst offender.
You're in good company -- 149 hours = 6.3 days. [airlinerwatch.com] Were these their kiosks?
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I don't understand what everyone's issue is. I run deb10 and chrome, i never close chrome and normally leave it with multiple tabs open. This morning, reading this after chrome being open for at least 48 hours, 2.9GiB of memory being used by the entire system. I do however block all JS and ads. So maybe its not the browsers that leak memory, maybe its the shitty JS all over the internet?
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Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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it is very likely Mozilla will implement this "feature" also in short order.
They've done it a long time ago. Although it can be changed back in the about:config.
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
>"They've done it a long time ago. Although it can be changed back in the about:config"
Not quite. Firefox has never hidden the TLD (like "www") they just defaulted to hiding the protocol and trailing slash. Much less hostile than what Chrome is doing now. Anyway, easy to revert even that in Firefox:
browser.urlbar.trimURLs;false
https://developer.mozilla.org/... [mozilla.org]
You can't revert Chrome's changes, unless there is some third-party addon.
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It's quite simple to fix in Safari (and, when Apple made this change some years ago, this was literally the first thing I did):
Go to "Preferences", click the "Advanced" tab, put a checkmark beside "Show Full Website Address".
Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Informative)
Or Palemoon if you like standard stuff like a taskbar and such.
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All Firefox does is copy Chrome, expect the same "feature" in a couple of releases.
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A host file is a solution when using IPv4. If you have IPv6 switched on then the hosts file can be circumvented if the target website has an IPv6 address as well as an IPv4 address. Turn off IPv6 on your network device(s) if you want your hosts file to work properly. You might also install uBlock Origin to Firefox. Works very well for blocking ads etc.
Captcha: landfill
Criticism (Score:5, Informative)
However the announcement provoked a fresh wave of criticism,
And here's some fresh criticism: THIS IS STUPID.
Put it back the way it's supposed to be, or I'm switching to Firefox. Don't want to, I like Chrome a lot, but this is unacceptable.
Re:Criticism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Criticism (Score:5, Interesting)
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Put it back the way it's supposed to be, or I'm switching to Firefox...
That's funny as hell. Next week Firefox will do something really stupid, and people will come out screaming, *Firefox sucks! I'm switching back to Chrome* Rinse, repeat, bla bla bla
Damned if the bullshit politics isn't exactly the same... It's some universal thing
Just so you know, Netscape isn't dead yet
Re: THIS IS STUPID (Score:4, Funny)
duke_cheetah2003 observed:
And here's some fresh criticism: THIS IS STUPID.
It is exactly that: stupid.
It's not stupid of Google. The Big G is just trying to give its users what they want: an Interweb that doesn't require them to think.
What's stupid is the average user. And foolish, besides. They don't want to have to know about that nerd stuff over there on the left side of the URL. It makes them uneasy, in no small part because it's a constant reminder that there are people in the world who are smarter than they are. They don't like that. They vastly prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of as many things as possible.
That's why Google is their friend. It doesn't make them have to actually know stuff. If there's anything they want to know, they ask their pal, Google, and it tells them.
Problem solved.
They also resent people who try to get them to care about their online privacy. That stuff makes them really uncomfortable, so they deal with the anxiety it creates by turning a deaf ear to any such importunings. Privacy is just too complicated and scary. And frustrating. And inconvenient. And they just want to watch cat videos or epic fail videos or conspiracy videos or a 20-minute walkthrough of the process of assembling a kit-based, blackface-style, tube-driven guitar amp that will cost $1,000.00 in parts, and sound exactly like a 1960's Fender Princeton combo when it's completed (I've done this myself).
Or porn. There's always that.
So you can't get 'em to focus on anything that requires even a minimum grasp of actual facts, because the stupider they are, the faster they flee in terror from those treacherous, obstinate, forboding things. And you can't even begin to get them to look at subjects as complex, nuanced, and uncertain as their own online privacy, because all that does is make them feel even more helpless about living in a world that keeps getting scarier, harder for them to understand, and ever-more-quickly-changing than they have been able to adapt to.
They want to be soothed. Reassured: that they are the very center of their little universe, that everybody loves them, that everything will be okay. And that there will always be another cat video, another listicle, another ranting nitwit in a box on TV yelling at a different professional yammerhead about some subject in which they have no interest.
Sportsball. Gotta have the sportsball, just like you gotta have the frickin' sharks, amiright?
The hell with all the nerd stuff on the left. I mean, we don't pay attention to any of the other crap that comes from the left, do we?
Damn commies ...
Re: THIS IS STUPID (Score:4)
You enter "https://mydomain.home" and Google dishonestly and unkindly replaces this with a futile search for "mydomain.home" in the wild, wild internet, instead of fetching it form where ever your own DNS says it is.
This is HIJACKING in the same sense as "take this plane to Cuba or I will cut your fingernails with this tiny pair of scissors I managed to get past the DHS scanners".
If Google were smaller, they would be doing hard labour on Parchment Farm for this!
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or a 20-minute walkthrough of the process of assembling a kit-based, blackface-style, tube-driven guitar amp that will cost $1,000.00 in parts, and sound exactly like a 1960's Fender Princeton combo when it's completed (I've done this myself).
Until I got to "(I've done this myself)", I don't think I've ever felt so personally attacked on these forums.
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>"Put it back the way it's supposed to be, or I'm switching to Firefox."
I don't think such threats will mean anything to Google :)
>" Don't want to, I like Chrome a lot, but this is unacceptable."
There are already a zillion other (and better) reasons to be using Firefox. I wouldn't let your decision hinge on this.
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There are already a zillion other (and better) reasons to be using Firefox.
Plus there are even more reasons not to use Chrome.
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>"Plus there are even more reasons not to use Chrome."
LOL! Great logic exercise, there!
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There are already a zillion other (and better) reasons to be using Firefox. I wouldn't let your decision hinge on this.
I like Chrome. It does what I need it to do and has features I like to use (mainly that history is shared between all devices, that's just huge for me. I have a lot of devices.) Besides, frankly, I read that article more closely, and Google already made an extension that ensures you always see the full URL.
But it's still stupid. People need to become smarter, not have everything dumbed down to their stupidity.
Frankly, that's where computing went all wrong in the 90's with the introduction of Windows and
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And then, Firefox and others will do the same. :(
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But www.example.com is my web server (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah, but if only there were a way for example.com to know that somebody had made an http request and route it appropriately.
(But seriously, I agree, this change makes no sense.)
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Sure let me just re-route traffic intended for http://www.example.com/ [example.com] to https://example.com/ [example.com] I'm sure the two domains are serving completely identical content. If they are, what was the point of providing HTTPS in the first place? You obviously have no sensitive content that needs protection and don't consider the users privacy to be an issue. If the two domains are not serving the same content, then you have a problem with this redirect.
Getting a little confused here. The assumption was that www.example.com is a webserver, while example.com is not. Of course they're not serving identical web content; one isn't serving any web content at all.
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>"Does google intend to take over and change the web now that chrome is so popular?"
Haven't you been paying attention the past few years? That is exactly what they HAVE been doing. Welcome to the second Internet Explorer age. Everyone is handing Google control, without hardly even blinking.
Reminder: Firefox is available for all platforms, including phones, is open source, standards-based, community-driven, and takes performance and security very seriously.
Re: But www.example.com is my web server (Score:2)
Reminder: Firefox is funded by Google, and even have their SF office in the same building as Google.
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Actually, www.example.com is registered to IANA - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
https://www.iana.org/domains/r... [iana.org]
Now you know. :-)
A quick fix to restore the sanity (Score:5, Informative)
chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme -> Disable
chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-trivial-subdomains -> Disable
Google however can remove these options as well.
Re:A quick fix to restore the sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
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But... but... it won't look as nice!
Re: A quick fix to restore the sanity (Score:2)
It needn't be Courier. There are nice looking monospaced fonts.
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Yes, this is the fix that is the "easy" solution - not installing telemetry extensions as google is suggesting!
This messed me up just yesterday. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was debugging something, and I had two tabs, one which was working, one which wasn't. Flipping back and forth, the URLs were identical. So I had to get them into editting mode to figure out that one had the www. and one did not (and the API I was using seemed to have some endpoints under the www. and some bare).
But thank goodness this frees up space at the end of the URL For another 5 characters of URL-encoded hash! That's important stuff, right there!
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I recommend automated probers to check for that. If you screw something up enough that "domain" and "www.domain" serve effectively different content, you really want that caught by automated systems before it causes problems for humans. If you rely on humans to catch most errors, than your browser is not your main problem.
I'm not sure why people are so upset about this. I want computers to show me the important information by default, as long as I can get to the complete data easily enough. The changeab
At least make it configurable (Score:3)
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At least make it configurable so that the user can decide if they want to see ‘https’ and ‘www’, or not.
It is configurable! If you want to see all the URL info, you use Firefox. If you want some random ad agency to decide for you, you use Chrome.
We already have a configuration option for this.
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>"At least make it configurable so that the user can decide if they want to see âhttpsâ(TM) and âwwwâ(TM), or not."
You want Google to make something configurable? LOL! Haven't you used Chrome or Android before? "Configurability = bad." Configurability conflicts with "clean" or "easy", in their view. Hide everything, force lists to be not alphabetized, fixed fonts or like 3 choices, disappearing stuff. Every time I use any Google-produced product I am frustrated by the lack of co
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Kinda like that "fantastic" Windows setting to hide file extensions by default.
it is (Score:2)
Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Scheme
Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Trivial Subdomains
Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref
Version 76.0.3809.87 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Linux.
Not overly surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're malware, why wouldn't you want to help your partners in crime by hiding the complete path of a URL?
It's not an address bar anymore... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially a walled garden for Google users who can't be bothered to change a default to turn it off.
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>"Essentially a walled garden for Google users who can't be bothered to change a default to turn it off."
That is assuming Google will allow a control to turn it off, and CONTINUE to allow such a control in the future...
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It'll be the new AOL Keywords. Big players will "word squat" and buy up their brands. If you type in a keyword you'll go to the site rather than a search. The next step after that is Google just showing you their hosted AMP version of a page.
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Google is going to invent an "I'm feeling lucky" button?
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Makes sense. Any other justification for this really bad idea is just bogus.
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Evil? (Score:2, Interesting)
Clearly, "don't be evil" is only a distant memory. Hiding these kinds of details fosters a mentality that users should not be watchful of details in the URL, but that everyone should just trust the browser.
They should not require installing an extension to turn this off but merely a setting like
dumbass=false
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The evil of the MBA is far worse than the evil of the Nazi, for people fight back against Nazis.
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It's because of MBAs that Google has a database of every Muslim in the US (or, for that matter, every Jew). But I'm sure the US government will always remain angels, and no harm will ever come of that. The government of China, though, clearly not angels. And it's because of MBAs that Google is helping China murder dissidents. Maybe they're past 8 million already? We might never know.
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Product managers ARE evil. After they've been at it a while, they all wind up as Lawful Evil.
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They should not require installing an extension to turn this off but merely a setting like
dumbass=false
Setting dumbass to false immediately exits and uninstalls the Chrome browser.
Next update (Score:2)
will be animated ads for whatever you clicked on, instead of an address bar.
www.www.www.www.www.com (Score:3)
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THAT domain is for sale, by the way!
What is the risk??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider how many malware infections caused by MS Windows hiding file extensions by default!!!
The huge questions is, can this be used for tricking people to go to faked/malware websites, or not???
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I expect somebody will find a way to use this for attacks. May take a bot because I am sure no actually competent criminal did expect for Google to do something this stupid.
Marketing opportunity for alternative browsers (Score:3)
www is not insignificant (Score:5, Insightful)
While eliminating http/https at least has some alternative indicator, www.website.com will often do something different than website.com. This change will be seriously confusing.
I was going to swap out Chrome for Firefox anyway, I think I'll wait until this update so that they'll correlate that particular uninstall with this dumb change.
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I would argue if there is a website that does different things for both the website was already confusing before Google's change. Common accepted convention expects them to both go to the same place.
No, the common convention is for there to be one and only one DNS name for a website.
Re:www is not insignificant (Score:5, Interesting)
While eliminating http/https at least has some alternative indicator, www.website.com will often do something different than website.com. This change will be seriously confusing.
If www.website.com and website.com go to different servers or show different results, then they're broken and should be fixed, because everyone who doesn't understand the details of FQDNs (which is, to a first order approximation, everyone) expects them to be the same.
I had a (in hindsight) hilarious episode with my mom, where I was telling her over the phone to go to some website and she was somehow getting something completely different, even after I carefully spelled and she carefully typed, the name a dozen or more times. We were both getting really frustrated. I was just giving her the second-level domain (e.g. foo.com -- I don't remember what the site actually was), which is what I used, and knew worked fine. But she "knew" that all web sites must begin with "www", so she was typing "www.foo.com", but their configuration was confused and broken and www.foo.com and foo.com were different. After I eventually figured out why she was getting such hugely different results than I was, I checked and the two hostnames even resolved to unrelated IPs which (per IP geolocation) were in different regions of the US.
Don't ever do that to your users. If this Chrome change convinces web developers who are putting www.foo.com and foo.com on different servers and serving different content to stop doing that, it will be a great thing.
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If www.website.com and website.com go to different servers or show different results, then they're broken and should be fixed
The most common problem with what Google is doing is a situation where content is only accessible via www.domain and there is not even a web server listening on domain or vis versa.
If the assumption www.domain = domain were correct nobody would be concerned about this and there would be no point in a www.domain convention even existing in the first place.
The simple fact is there is more to networks and Internet than the WWW. Demanding everyone do everything from one DNS name or their systems are declared "
Can still copy/paste (Score:2)
It's just like Apple's Safari and, like Safari, you can still click in the address bar to copy and paste the URL. Though when I tried it last night, I had to click twice.
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It's just like Apple's Safari and, like Safari, you can still click in the address bar to copy and paste the URL. Though when I tried it last night, I had to click twice.
With Chrome you don't have to click twice to copy. Click once, then Ctrl/Cmd-V, then paste it wherever, and you'll get the whole URL, including the scheme.
Note that I'm not saying I support this change. I don't think it's awful, but I don't think it's necessary or useful, either, though I can't claim to have spent a lot of time or effort thinking about it. Maybe there are some issues (on either side) that make it really good or really bad.
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You can disable this in Safari's preferences - it's the first item on the "advanced" tab (on desktop anyway).
due to a backlash (Score:1)
I read it as backslash. I don't think I've heard anyone say backslash since ~2000.
Pretty stupid move (Score:4, Interesting)
Worst case, if a company only has a website set up on site.com, a hacker just needs to break into their nameserver account and set up www.site.com to point to the hacker's own server. Redirecting site.com would result in everyone immediately knowing something was amiss, as the people maintaining the web server would suddenly find they were unable to login (because they're trying to login to the hacker's server). But if www.site.com was originally never configured, it'd be a while before anyone noticed the hack, especially with Chrome now reporting both the original and malicous site as "site.com".
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Depending on how you have your site configured on your nameserver, site.com and www.site.com can actually be set to different web servers.
And let's hope this idiocy will finally be put to an end.
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So much ignorance. Not all http accessible domains are meant for users to connect to.
Indeed. And as such they should *never* be accessible through the www hostname or directly through the TLD because a user *will* use those interchangeably.
So let me repeat myself: "let's hope this idiocy will finally be put to an end."
Power users? (Score:2)
Aren't power users the least likely to need the full info in the address bar? What sense does it make to put in an extension aimed at power users? Joe Schmoe is the one that should have all the info needed to avoid a malicious site.
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www.fi (Score:2)
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It will be fun to see if Chrome actually shortens it to plain "fi".
Google is probably planning a takeover of the whole .fi TLD anyway...
(I kid, I kid... I think)
that new extension (Score:2)
"Google says it has also built a Chrome extension that doesn't obfuscate the URL to "help power users recognize suspicious sites and report them to Safe Browsing""
Isn't this just another way of saying "We've made it harder by default to recognize suspicious sites and made it harder to report them to Safe Browsing for the mindless masses."
...and many just stopped using Chrome (Score:4)
These idiots do not understand how useful the www and http are. You just opened the door to more bad actors on-line.
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You just opened the door to more bad actors on-line.
This might be exactly what Google wants to happen so they can justify pushing tighter content control into later versions of Chrome to "protect" the user from those bad actors.
www is not trivial. (Score:2)
How are we going to know if we're on www.somedomain.com or just somedomain.com? They're both valid and separate URLs. This is about the most asinine thing I've ever heard of.
Oh well. I don't use Chrome anyway.
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You and I know they are different and separate, but less technical people do not. It's a really bad practice to make these go to different sites, or do something different.
What will happen to example.com? (Score:2)
Suppose you have two sites. One is www.example.com, the other is example.com. Contents are different. To the user, they are different sites under the same url: example.com. So to www.example.com you add a line at the top: "to revisit this site, type www.example.com".
Tropic Thunder (Score:1)
also against this. (Score:2)
They've Lost Their Mind (Score:1)
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another "feature" nobody asked for (Score:2)
Who are these puny idiots in the marketing who decide stupid shit like that?
Interesting possibilities (Score:1)
So what if you go to facebook.com instead of www.facebook.com? They could have an entirely different interface on each URL.
Some domains don't have a blank site (without the www). So I could put up bad site up instead.
Besides, it's chrome. Just say no to google.