5 ms·

The importance of “http://”

23 points by bensummers 17y ago

nudge 17y ago
Jeez. I really don't get the fuss about this. 99% of web users probably won't even notice, except they might be pleased with the removal of the incomprehensible (and, for years now, unnecessary for input) code in front of the part of the website address they recognise and understand. And for everybody else, what exactly is the problem? Copy/paste? I'm sure that can be fixed, even if it means the user setting "show http:// http:// in my address bar" as a preference. I read a lot on this and other websites about opinionated design. This is one of those things. The chrome team think this is a good idea. Some people disagree. As anyone who has ever run any kind of open source project can tell you, you can't just react to objections with "Okay then let's switch it back". At some point you have to actually make your own decision, weighing up the benefits against the costs, taking into account the number of people experiencing each. In this case, it seems like a massive improvement for simplicity for most web users, and a trivial, surely quite easily fixed bug for an unknown percentage of the small percentage of users who would ever need or want the 'http:// http:// there. Just my opinion. I would be interested to hear what other people think.
- ay 17y ago
  - it makes the system second-guess in more places. Means more complexity - understandingly some bugs to fix (tinyurl.com/http-strip) - the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable. Now either the site owners have to jump through the hoops to replicate the second-guessing logic to their sites, or everyone who views the URL, will have to copy/paste manually. Another couple of questions I will start asking as a user: why does the ftp:// thing pops up in front of the URL if I use it ? And, what is https:// https:// and why is it suddenly there when I only want to go to gmail.com ? This change noticeably increases the number of places which violate the principle of least surprise. But maybe I am a corner-case :-) EDIT: And, if we look at the whole "address bar" under the same UI angle - the path and the query string is equally a useless technobabble for anyone non-geek. So, I think we would go further and just show the host name, while we are at it.
  - moe 17y ago
    .com is also useless technobabble. We should strip it and only show TLDs other than com.
  - ugh 17y ago
    - the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable. What?! I know of no one who ever, ever, ever said http:// http:// when mentioning a URL. I certainly don’t do that.
    - ay 17y ago
      #define mention(url) type_or_paste_into_facebook(url) Sorry that my wording was unclear. "referencing in writing elsewhere" might have been a better one.
      - krainboltgreene 17y ago
        People have been using "lol, hey, go to www.google.com" for years without problems.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    It's a bit late in the game, but maybe we could adopt a new one-character standard to replace http:// http:// with something shorter, but still easy to parse, like the @name system being made popular by twitter, etc. Some ideas: :news.ycombinator.com $news.ycombinator.com !news.ycombinator.com
- isleyaardvark 17y ago
  I have to wonder how it is a "massive improvement for simplicity for most web users". Here's a question: What problem does this solve for most users? Was the existence of "http:// http:// at the beginning of a url actually a problem for most users? If it's to emphasize the domain, Google Chrome 5.0 beta on OS X and IE8 both have domain highlighting, without breaking copy/paste. I would also dispute the idea that only a "small percentage of users who would ever need or want the 'http:// http:// there." Facebook and Twitter can drive as much traffic to some sites as Google. Breaking copy/paste doesn't help in sharing links.
  - nudge 17y ago
    Copy/paste seems to be working perfectly well on Chrome for me. And if there are other buggy cases, why are you assuming they cannot be fixed? Facebook and twitter will work just fine. The problem it solves is one of simplicity. http doesn't mean anything to many people. I happen to like it gone - it's a redundant piece of information removed from my UI. I appreciate that.
    - isleyaardvark 17y ago
      The article listed bugs. Facebook and Twitter will work fine, it would just be more inconvenient because of the bugs introduced by the new scheme. It's not redundant information, it is information on what protocol is being used. That is important information. And this information is still being displayed, the only difference is it is displayed in an alternate form of an icon. An icon representation introduced by Chromium and unfamiliar to the majority of internet users. Now the Chromium developers have to decide how to display alternate protocols, will https be represented as text or as an icon? Will other browsers use the same icon representation? Are we assuming Chromium users will only use Chromium, will this confuse users who regularly use other browsers? To say that other bugs will just be fixed ignores the bugs caused by the unnecessarily introduced complexity.
      - nudge 17y ago
        You say the protocol being used is important. Is it? Why? I think it is not. I think the important things for 99.9% of people are: (i) this is a website, (ii) this is a secure website. The actual protocol being used is a technical issue that the user does not need to know. The user just needs to know if it is secure or not. You take issue with the icon. For years browsers have added a padlock to the UI when https:// https:// is being used. Do we therefore need the 'https:// https:// part? Do you think there should be no such icon? In fact, I would argue that displaying a globe icon for most websites, and a padlock icon for secure websites, is an enormous boon for web security. Consider the previous situation, without icons: you are asking the user to spot the difference between 'http:// http:// and 'https:// https://. This is not something everyone will manage. You don't like the abstraction because you are comfortable with what is being abstracted away. This does not mean the abstraction is not valuable. It means it is not valuable to you.
- daleharvey 17y ago
  I agree, when I am browsing urls are as good as irrelevant to me, obviously when I have my developer hat on I need to see them. when I seen the april fools joke about the redesign of ie9 I thought it looked awesome - http://livesino.net/archives/2587.live http://livesino.net/archives/2587.live
rubyrescue 17y ago
try it - if you copy from the bar it adds http:// http:// into the buffer
- moe 17y ago
  I did and it doesn't. On OSX. When pasting into adium. It seems to work when pasting into a terminal. Haven't tried other apps, yet. And yes, that's a big problem. I don't want to double-check my urls when pasting them into various messengers, skype or whatever. Here's a tip google: If you can't implement it 200% reliable then don't f-ck with something as essential as URL copy/paste. People will not be amused at all.
  - ay 17y ago
    Check if your behaviour matches one of these: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?q=label:HTTPStripping and file a new one if not. EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "http:// http:// since: * after looking at it in the omnibox, I decide I like it better this way indeed, and 6 less keystrokes. The others will have to copypaste or the webapp writers will have to figure a way to highlight it :-) * the copypaste is not working in the linux case either, but that's one of the logged bugs. It's really the first point that I am trying to say is the biggest impact that this change will have. "If it works in Chrome, it has to work everywhere".
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - arantius 17y ago
      > EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "http:// http:// since: And I am intentionally not clicking the link because ... it's not a link. I have a greasemonkey script that automatically turns plain text URLs into clickable links. But the text in your post is not a URL. It's a domain and a path, but with no scheme it is not a URL.
  - ashleyw 17y ago
    Adium's text entry is rich text, it'll accept actual hyperlinks. Paste a URL from Chrome in and right click > 'Edit Link', it should show the correct URL, with the link text as the URL minus http:// http://.
mansr 17y ago
This reminds me of what happened when Microsoft decided to trim known suffixes off displayed filenames. Has everybody forgotten the hot-babe.jpg.exe viruses? With unicode allowed in domain names, it's only a matter of time before someone registers http：／／gmail.com.
- nhebb 17y ago
  They still do that. One of the first things I do on a new Windows system is to turn that "feature" off.
  - pavlov 17y ago
    To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.
    - uriel 17y ago
      And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.
      - superchink 17y ago
        http://cl.ly/UA5 http://cl.ly/UA5 (Finder Preferences)
      - edd 17y ago
        Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Show all filename extensions
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      An important difference is that you can still change the extension. Suppose you have a file called "foo.zip" and wish to change it to "foo.cbz" On Windows, renaming the file makes appears to work, and the interface will indeed show "foo.cbz". But what it actually does is rename the file "foo.cbz.zip". The actual extension remains entirely hidden and untouchable as long as the global option to hide extensions is turned on. On the Mac, changing the name to "foo.cbz" will prompt a warning that you might cause the file to open in a different application, and IIRC presents the options of naming it "foo.cbz.zip" or "foo.cbz". Neither approach is perfect, but I think what this illustrates is the difference between walling off complexity and just hiding it. We see the same difference with Chrome, as hiding http:// http:// is just visual, but the altered way of copying URLs to the clipboard is actually blocking the user's access to that complexity.
krainboltgreene 17y ago
Removing choice from users is bad... But how many average users do you know actively pick what protocol to use? None of them. For them, HTTP is it. Only geeks use FTP anymore.
jwr 17y ago
I find it mindboggling that instead of removing the silly and superfluous "www." they are trying to remove the meaningful and important "http:// http://. It doesn't solve any actual problem and creates a slew of new ones.
- tzs 17y ago
  "www" is only superfluous at some sites, and there is no way they can tell which. Even doing a name lookup on both and checking if the IP is the same is not sufficient, because they could be different virtual hosts on the same IP.
ErrantX 17y ago
In all honesty I have only just noticed that the machine I am working on has this feature. I see the draw backs but the fact I haven't noticed for about 48 hours or more is, well, telling IMO.
- nudge 17y ago
  Agreed. People seem to be upset mainly because of what they imagine certain users will do, rather than what they have actually seen happen.
aegnor 17y ago
Using the latest daily build of chromium I couldn't reproduce a single one of the "issues" that the post presented. It seems they've all been fixed before he wrote the post.

23 points by bensummers 17y ago

nudge 17y ago

Jeez. I really don't get the fuss about this. 99% of web users probably won't even notice, except they might be pleased with the removal of the incomprehensible (and, for years now, unnecessary for input) code in front of the part of the website address they recognise and understand. And for everybody else, what exactly is the problem? Copy/paste? I'm sure that can be fixed, even if it means the user setting "show http:// http:// in my address bar" as a preference. I read a lot on this and other websites about opinionated design. This is one of those things. The chrome team think this is a good idea. Some people disagree. As anyone who has ever run any kind of open source project can tell you, you can't just react to objections with "Okay then let's switch it back". At some point you have to actually make your own decision, weighing up the benefits against the costs, taking into account the number of people experiencing each. In this case, it seems like a massive improvement for simplicity for most web users, and a trivial, surely quite easily fixed bug for an unknown percentage of the small percentage of users who would ever need or want the 'http:// http:// there. Just my opinion. I would be interested to hear what other people think.

ay 17y ago
- it makes the system second-guess in more places. Means more complexity - understandingly some bugs to fix (tinyurl.com/http-strip) - the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable. Now either the site owners have to jump through the hoops to replicate the second-guessing logic to their sites, or everyone who views the URL, will have to copy/paste manually. Another couple of questions I will start asking as a user: why does the ftp:// thing pops up in front of the URL if I use it ? And, what is https:// https:// and why is it suddenly there when I only want to go to gmail.com ? This change noticeably increases the number of places which violate the principle of least surprise. But maybe I am a corner-case :-) EDIT: And, if we look at the whole "address bar" under the same UI angle - the path and the query string is equally a useless technobabble for anyone non-geek. So, I think we would go further and just show the host name, while we are at it.
- moe 17y ago
  .com is also useless technobabble. We should strip it and only show TLDs other than com.
- ugh 17y ago
  - the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable. What?! I know of no one who ever, ever, ever said http:// http:// when mentioning a URL. I certainly don’t do that.
  - ay 17y ago
    #define mention(url) type_or_paste_into_facebook(url) Sorry that my wording was unclear. "referencing in writing elsewhere" might have been a better one.
    - krainboltgreene 17y ago
      People have been using "lol, hey, go to www.google.com" for years without problems.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  It's a bit late in the game, but maybe we could adopt a new one-character standard to replace http:// http:// with something shorter, but still easy to parse, like the @name system being made popular by twitter, etc. Some ideas: :news.ycombinator.com $news.ycombinator.com !news.ycombinator.com
isleyaardvark 17y ago
I have to wonder how it is a "massive improvement for simplicity for most web users". Here's a question: What problem does this solve for most users? Was the existence of "http:// http:// at the beginning of a url actually a problem for most users? If it's to emphasize the domain, Google Chrome 5.0 beta on OS X and IE8 both have domain highlighting, without breaking copy/paste. I would also dispute the idea that only a "small percentage of users who would ever need or want the 'http:// http:// there." Facebook and Twitter can drive as much traffic to some sites as Google. Breaking copy/paste doesn't help in sharing links.
- nudge 17y ago
  Copy/paste seems to be working perfectly well on Chrome for me. And if there are other buggy cases, why are you assuming they cannot be fixed? Facebook and twitter will work just fine. The problem it solves is one of simplicity. http doesn't mean anything to many people. I happen to like it gone - it's a redundant piece of information removed from my UI. I appreciate that.
  - isleyaardvark 17y ago
    The article listed bugs. Facebook and Twitter will work fine, it would just be more inconvenient because of the bugs introduced by the new scheme. It's not redundant information, it is information on what protocol is being used. That is important information. And this information is still being displayed, the only difference is it is displayed in an alternate form of an icon. An icon representation introduced by Chromium and unfamiliar to the majority of internet users. Now the Chromium developers have to decide how to display alternate protocols, will https be represented as text or as an icon? Will other browsers use the same icon representation? Are we assuming Chromium users will only use Chromium, will this confuse users who regularly use other browsers? To say that other bugs will just be fixed ignores the bugs caused by the unnecessarily introduced complexity.
    - nudge 17y ago
      You say the protocol being used is important. Is it? Why? I think it is not. I think the important things for 99.9% of people are: (i) this is a website, (ii) this is a secure website. The actual protocol being used is a technical issue that the user does not need to know. The user just needs to know if it is secure or not. You take issue with the icon. For years browsers have added a padlock to the UI when https:// https:// is being used. Do we therefore need the 'https:// https:// part? Do you think there should be no such icon? In fact, I would argue that displaying a globe icon for most websites, and a padlock icon for secure websites, is an enormous boon for web security. Consider the previous situation, without icons: you are asking the user to spot the difference between 'http:// http:// and 'https:// https://. This is not something everyone will manage. You don't like the abstraction because you are comfortable with what is being abstracted away. This does not mean the abstraction is not valuable. It means it is not valuable to you.
daleharvey 17y ago
I agree, when I am browsing urls are as good as irrelevant to me, obviously when I have my developer hat on I need to see them. when I seen the april fools joke about the redesign of ie9 I thought it looked awesome - http://livesino.net/archives/2587.live http://livesino.net/archives/2587.live

rubyrescue 17y ago

try it - if you copy from the bar it adds http:// http:// into the buffer

moe 17y ago
I did and it doesn't. On OSX. When pasting into adium. It seems to work when pasting into a terminal. Haven't tried other apps, yet. And yes, that's a big problem. I don't want to double-check my urls when pasting them into various messengers, skype or whatever. Here's a tip google: If you can't implement it 200% reliable then don't f-ck with something as essential as URL copy/paste. People will not be amused at all.
- ay 17y ago
  Check if your behaviour matches one of these: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?q=label:HTTPStripping and file a new one if not. EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "http:// http:// since: * after looking at it in the omnibox, I decide I like it better this way indeed, and 6 less keystrokes. The others will have to copypaste or the webapp writers will have to figure a way to highlight it :-) * the copypaste is not working in the linux case either, but that's one of the logged bugs. It's really the first point that I am trying to say is the biggest impact that this change will have. "If it works in Chrome, it has to work everywhere".
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - arantius 17y ago
    > EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "http:// http:// since: And I am intentionally not clicking the link because ... it's not a link. I have a greasemonkey script that automatically turns plain text URLs into clickable links. But the text in your post is not a URL. It's a domain and a path, but with no scheme it is not a URL.
- ashleyw 17y ago
  Adium's text entry is rich text, it'll accept actual hyperlinks. Paste a URL from Chrome in and right click > 'Edit Link', it should show the correct URL, with the link text as the URL minus http:// http://.

mansr 17y ago

This reminds me of what happened when Microsoft decided to trim known suffixes off displayed filenames. Has everybody forgotten the hot-babe.jpg.exe viruses? With unicode allowed in domain names, it's only a matter of time before someone registers http：／／gmail.com.

nhebb 17y ago
They still do that. One of the first things I do on a new Windows system is to turn that "feature" off.
- pavlov 17y ago
  To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.
  - uriel 17y ago
    And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.
    - superchink 17y ago
      http://cl.ly/UA5 http://cl.ly/UA5 (Finder Preferences)
    - edd 17y ago
      Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Show all filename extensions
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    An important difference is that you can still change the extension. Suppose you have a file called "foo.zip" and wish to change it to "foo.cbz" On Windows, renaming the file makes appears to work, and the interface will indeed show "foo.cbz". But what it actually does is rename the file "foo.cbz.zip". The actual extension remains entirely hidden and untouchable as long as the global option to hide extensions is turned on. On the Mac, changing the name to "foo.cbz" will prompt a warning that you might cause the file to open in a different application, and IIRC presents the options of naming it "foo.cbz.zip" or "foo.cbz". Neither approach is perfect, but I think what this illustrates is the difference between walling off complexity and just hiding it. We see the same difference with Chrome, as hiding http:// http:// is just visual, but the altered way of copying URLs to the clipboard is actually blocking the user's access to that complexity.

krainboltgreene 17y ago

Removing choice from users is bad... But how many average users do you know actively pick what protocol to use? None of them. For them, HTTP is it. Only geeks use FTP anymore.

jwr 17y ago

I find it mindboggling that instead of removing the silly and superfluous "www." they are trying to remove the meaningful and important "http:// http://. It doesn't solve any actual problem and creates a slew of new ones.

tzs 17y ago
"www" is only superfluous at some sites, and there is no way they can tell which. Even doing a name lookup on both and checking if the IP is the same is not sufficient, because they could be different virtual hosts on the same IP.

ErrantX 17y ago

In all honesty I have only just noticed that the machine I am working on has this feature. I see the draw backs but the fact I haven't noticed for about 48 hours or more is, well, telling IMO.

nudge 17y ago
Agreed. People seem to be upset mainly because of what they imagine certain users will do, rather than what they have actually seen happen.

aegnor 17y ago

Using the latest daily build of chromium I couldn't reproduce a single one of the "issues" that the post presented. It seems they've all been fixed before he wrote the post.