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After 19 years, http:// prefix is getting ditched (in Google Chrome)
- proee 17y agomight as well axe out the 'www' while you're at it.
- there 17y agonot while there are still stupid websites that don't work without it.
- frou_dh 17y agoA game site I used to frequent. I always thought that this would scupper new word-of-mouth visitors. http://ntsc-uk.com/ http://ntsc-uk.com/ http://www.ntsc-uk.com/ http://www.ntsc-uk.com/
- pkulak 17y agohaha, nice
- derefr 17y agoSo let it be the browser's responsibility to try both with and without it. They'll either be the same, or one will be nonexistent or a not-found page; it's not like people put one site at www.x and another at x.
- mbrubeck 17y agoYou would hope so, but unfortunately you'd be wrong - a tiny fraction of the time, but still...
- stanleydrew 17y agoWell that would seriously increase http requests and dns lookups which slows down everything.
- philwelch 17y agoFor example: http://pullmantransit.com/ http://pullmantransit.com/ http://www.pullmantransit.com/ http://www.pullmantransit.com/
- tlrobinson 17y agoProbably Apache defaulting to the first virtual host.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tetha 17y agoI am unsure if this is intrinsically stupid, but in our university, we have subdomains of the form www.faculty.university.de, mail.faculty.university.de, ssh-gate.faculty.university.de, mayflower.servers.faculty.university.de and so on. At least the ssh-gate is different from the www-server, and it appears the www-server is equal to the mail-server. Stripping the www here would be a world of hurt. Long story short: the www is not necessarily stupid, especially if you use it to designate a web server from different servers.
- there 17y agothere is absolutely nothing preventing them from still using subdomains while making the domain itself resolve to something useful.
- frou_dh 17y agoNo way. There's nothing special about www. Subdomains could well resolve to different IP addresses.
- jluxenberg 17y agoSarcasm much?
- c00ki3s 17y agoIs this really true? Because I have wondered quite a few times. Is www.foo.bar just a subdomain like irc.foo.bar or mail.foo.bar? Is the default www.somesite.com basically just convention?
- yetanotherlogin 17y agoYes.
- postfuturist 17y agoLet's get rid of tld's, too!
- axod 17y agoAOL Keywords FTW!
- lurkinggrue 17y agoI propose we go to Compuserve navigation. Example: If you want google.com you type "go google" into the address bar and "Go CB" when you want a chat protocol.
- shaddi 17y agoFunny, but it seems using Chrome's address bar as a search box then clicking the first link is roughly equivalent. You remember the "login facebook" fiasco right? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...
- joshu 17y agoISTR you can't have CNAME on a domain name, which causes problems potentially with mail delivery. Everyone does it anyway...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dedward 17y agoYou can't have a CNAME record for something that also has another type of record.... I think that includes SOA records or NS records. That may be where the confusion comes from. There is also confusion regarding how they are resolved. If an A record is requested, but a CNAME is encountered, the resolver will then look up A record for the resource indicated by the CNAME. If the CNAME is specifically requested, it will return itself as expected. Couple this with different implementations of mail servers (and other stuff) not strictly following RFCs...... that led to a general consensus among many greying sysadmins now to try to avoid using CNAME records wherever possible, as they were more trouble than they were worth.
- joshu 17y agoThanks for the explanation!
- techiferous 17y agohttp://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/
- macrael 17y agoMobileSafari hasn't displayed http:// http:// since its inception.
- frou_dh 17y agoYes it has. I remember the hiding of it being one of the changes in an iPhone OS update.
- macrael 17y agoAlas, then I remember wrong. Regardless Safari has done it for a while. If someone can find discussion of its removal I'll edit my original post.
- tewks 17y agoIf you tap on the address bar then it shows the http:// http://.
- izendejas 17y agoLooks like Opera Mini removed it a while back also. I didn't even notice. :) So in the end, it's not that big a deal imho.
- roder 17y agoI agree with the sentiment on the thread that removing http:// http:// is a UX bug. Copy & Paste in this case is paramount over UI simplification. Keep it simple... do not make it a configurable option and do not remove http:// http://.
- mbrubeck 17y agoThe prefix is only removed from the "steady-state" display. It will still be there if you copy the URI from the address bar. EDIT: Verified that copying works in the current nightly build, although there are some quirks pasting into rich text controls in some apps (like Pidgin).
- avar 17y agoI presume that you mean "copying" via Ctrl+C and not the X11 way of simply highlighting the text. The latter is known to be broken in Chrome. I filed a bug for it that which was wontfixed: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=27972 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=27972
- mbrubeck 17y agoYep, I can confirm that pasting http: URIs from the X11 "primary selection" is broken in the current Chromium nightly.
- losvedir 17y agoI'm glad that got wontfixed. It's not the convention at all in Windows or OS X. I can't stand applications that unexpectedly mess with my clipboard. Lotus Notes does this all the time and it drives me nuts. I make an attachment, and bam, my copied text is gone.
- Jach 17y agoBut fixing this wouldn't affect Windows or OS X, and middle-click pasting is the convention in Linux. I hate when I use Windows and inevitably realize yet again I can't do it. (Also, highlighted text sends to a different clipboard than ctrl+c.)
- weilawei 17y agoI commonly use file:// and other protocols. How will it handle those?
- mbrubeck 17y agoEvery URI scheme except http: is still displayed. This includes https: as you can see in the screenshot: http://chromium.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=-2773481718577223512&name=Screen+shot+2010-04-12+at+4.33.14+PM.png&inline=1 http://chromium.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=-277348...
- kingkilr 17y agoUgh, I run chromium nightlys and this change has caught me off guard, I really don't like it.
- adamsmith 17y agoI wonder how this will effect spdy://, Google's potential replacement for HTTP. Maybe it will be good; you can hide spdy:// too and make the difference transparent to the user.
- c00p3r 17y agothe 7 of 8 chars in prefix is irrelevant, so, replacing them with an mini-icon in UI saves space and improves readability. The better question is - where are all favicons? =)
- blasdel 17y agoFavicons only in the tab bar. If you have too many tabs for the window's width, they stop getting displayed first on the selected tab (making the progress indicator invisible too) and eventually none of the tabs will have favicons as they get narrower. The stupid globe icon they added opens a useless focus-stealing "Page Info" popup window that's missing most of what should actually be shown in it (like cookies). They moved the bookmarks star to the right of the address bar to make room for it.
- X-Istence 17y agoI am still unsure as to whether or not I like this. One of the first things I do when I get to a page that requires my credit card information or any kind of username/password login information that can lead to a compromise of accounts that hold personal information is look at the address bar for the https:// https:// in the URL.
- wmf 17y agoChrome still displays https:// https://, and these days you should be looking for the company name anyway. See http://chromium.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=-2773481718577223512&name=Screen+shot+2010-04-12+at+4.33.14+PM.png&inline=1 http://chromium.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=-277348...
- X-Istence 17y agoEV certificates don't solve anything besides the fact that now the cert companies get to charge more for an SSL cert. Checking for https://<name https://<name of company> means I don't have to go hunting for where the EV cert sign is posted these days, the URL bar is still in a uniform location.
- Bjoern 17y agoThis makes absolutely no sense. Why try to fix something which is clearly not broken? EDIT: Spelling
- InclinedPlane 17y agoI'm surprised there's so much discussion about this topic. This seems a very straightforward and logical UI improvement. I suspect commentary on this has become basically a bike shed color argument at this point.
- Major_Grooves 17y agoTim Berners-Lee's "one regret" was the addition of the // to web addresses: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-r... Just think of the paper we'll save!
- tekhammer 17y agoIt seems to me that this comment was the driver for this Chrome "feature." The problem as I see it is that the Chrome devs are fixing it at the wrong place. Changing one user app, when the standards state it's necessary to include just breaks things. They need to change the standard, not the app. Until then, they've just got a broken implementation.
- lurkerperpetual 17y agoNot only the http:// http:// prefix but the whole idea of URL is a notion that should not be user-facing in an ideal world. Even the pretty REST ones are the internet equivalent of the command line voodoo many non-technical users just don't get and type in or copy paste without knowing what it means. If the URL is too long only geeks understand its components, let alone edit it in place to go somewhere else. It's debugging info for sure, but for most newbies is wasted vertical screen estate. Bookmarks and web navigation via links are already hiding the fact that 'you go to URLs' now, entering a URL in the bar is the corner case because not everything is easily accessible from everywhere else in very few steps. In the future the internet will be distributed and content addressable and not have a certain thing only available at a certain URL you have to remember, and then the URL will really go away. HTTP is client server, IP networks are peer to peer by nature.
- rbanffy 17y agoIn an ideal world, users would look at something they don't understand and figure it out. Not to a level of mastering all the underlying concepts, but to the level of becoming functional with it. In an ideal world, we don't feel the urge to hide something we think the user will not understand. Instead, in an ideal world, we teach the user. Be it by presenting the subject in ways the underlying concepts become clear and obvious, be it in showing them progressive levels of functionality and abstraction. In an ideal world, users are intelligent, curious and do not feel the urge to run away from things, they feel, are too complex for them. It's disturbing when someone advocates the idea of dumbing down what is a powerful idea in order not to upset those who think they would be upset, preventing them from learning something useful. I use URLs for many things, from describing database connections to navigating hierarchical datasets in data-driven visualization tools. There is a lot to it beyond HTTP. The Internet is not a blue "e". It's not a place of consumption, but one of sharing. And when it becomes distributed, like you say, URLs could really serve us well, not by mapping to server:port/folder/document.html but to content and letting the underlying, non-http protocols, work out what's the best place to get the resource you need. You say "in the future" but p2p file-sharing networks use URLs in the form of network://hash-to-what-you-want. If you assume your users are stupid, not only will you limit you product to those who know little, but you will rob them the possibility of learning something.