8 ms·

> This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com

> This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains... What ISPs teach their users anymore these days? Why the heck do we want to go back to that? Time for a modicum of historical perspective. If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general. At EVERY STEP in that journey there has whining and griping from the more technically advanced folks (like all of us on this forum). They zero in on the negatives, the tradeoffs that come with simplification. They don't see the positives because they're technically advanced enough and don't benefit from simplification (or so they think). Then after the griping whines (sic) down and they realize the world didn't end and the downsides really weren't that bad and we move forward towards a better, simpler, more usable web. Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. Bottom line, Apple & Google are putting usability above technical pedantry. That's the right priority for mass market technology products.

slenk 8y ago
Two prominent examples noted in the bug: https://citibank.com.sg https://citibank.com.sg and https://www.citibank.com.sg https://www.citibank.com.sg are different, http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org are different. Like, big companies run separate servers on the two domains. That's besides the fact where if you have www.example.www.example.com, it rewrites to example.example.com.
- DougBTX 8y ago
  The first citibank url doesn’t load for me, so it is site vs not site rather than two different sites, and both those ntp urls are redirecting me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ https://www.ntppool.org/en/ - perhaps there’s less substance than meets the eye to those complaints.
  - hrez 8y ago
    user1 - https://citibank.com.sg https://citibank.com.sg doesn't work for me user2 - it's fine, here is a screenshot of it working (while showing "beautified" https://www.citibank.com.sg https://www.citibank.com.sg) how is that not confusing?
    - wingworks 8y ago
      I think it's more on the website owners to fix their sites, users expect domain.com to be the same/auto-redirected to www.domain.com or vice versa. I think it's a good thing what Chrome is doing, it will push website owners to correctly set up their domain redirects and in the end, lessen end-user confusion.
      - jake_the_third 8y ago
        No, users expect to type what they see in the address bar, and get the same result every time. Can we even call them address bars anymore? And blaming website owners for working within the bounds of published standards is ridiculous and you know it.
        justadudeama 8y ago
        If I asked any non-technical person under the age of 20 the difference between www.google.com and google.com they probably couldn't tell me. Users expect www.example.com to equal example.com. If a website isn't redirecting one to the other, they, are doing something that is incredibly anti-user and it is a good thing that google/apple are forcing them to do it different.
        Jedd 8y ago
        > If I asked any non-technical person under the age of 20 ... Which is why technical specifications aren't written or maintained by non-technical people.
        jake_the_third 8y ago
- TheKarateKid 8y ago
  Just because a major bank and government organization use an unusual domain configuration, it doesn't mean that it is good practice.
  - tazard 8y ago
    And just because it's not a good practice doesn't mean that making both www and non www version look the same to the user and having it "just randomly not load" is a step forward for usability.
  - joan_lm 8y ago
    but showing an incorrect url is a bad practice
- ender7 8y ago
  So citibank and NTP will need to change their domain structure. That's okay: those are confusing structures. This is a tradeoff -- continuing to support already-confusing differences is not worth the loss of the ease-of-use gain referenced in the grandparent.
  - LocalH 8y ago
    It seems like the Internet is moving more to a "centralized" design where certain actors have decided "well, here's how we're going to do things now, deal with it". The golden age of the Internet is already dead, guys. We're unfortunately over the hump.
    - zipotm 8y ago
      EXACTLY!
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Also noted in the bug: m.tumblr.com IS NOT a mobile variant of tumblr.com I kinda wished I had that blog now so I could put a proof of concept up to show why this is a very bad idea from a phishing perspective.
redleggedfrog 8y ago
Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  How does hiding part of the domain make the web any easier to use?
  - basch 8y ago
    if anything, it should be time to declare that its a bit insane to expect lay people to be able to read from right to left and left to right concurrently, and understand all the delimiting punctuation correctly, along with unicode. its time to restructure url rendering to be right to left, and combine delimiters. dashes, periods, slashes, and subdomains and hundreds of tlds have made it too confusing. https://www.google.com./ https://www.google.com./ should become either https/com/google/www/ OR secure/com/google/www/ OR secure.com.google.www. Browsers can then just always bold the third word?
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Why even bother with URL language? It should just be 'Google Search' in the bar and you can see the URL if you want.
      - jeena 8y ago
        I have many websites which I don't let Google to index, how would my users access them?
        hmage 8y ago
        If you're not in Google's index, then it's likely you're not in Google's interest to use Google's product to visit your site, since the company prefers if you use their search rather than type links directly or follow links from other links, hence they want to kill the URL — https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
daveFNbuck 8y ago
How is this a usability improvement? What are the positives I'm not seeing?
mirko22 8y ago
and that’s why they are marketing companies not technical companies...
parliament32 8y ago
What exactly is the usability improvement from hiding part of the domain name? Maybe we should be hiding ".com" because that's trivial too? Better yet, why show "google" at all if from the page it's clear you're on Google? Might as well just fullscreen the content pane and be done with it.
- abalone 8y ago
  > What exactly is the usability improvement from hiding part of the domain name? Quite simply the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary. See comment from the ISP admin I cited re: user training. > Maybe we should be hiding ".com" because that's trivial too? Better yet, why show "google" at all if from the page it's clear you're on Google? Those aren't really serious counterexamples. ".com" is obviously not trivial; there are plenty of TLD variants in use. It is approximately 0.0000000001% as common to run separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com. And clearly different domains can spoof one another's content so that's not a way to be "clear" you're on google.com, whereas this is not generally an issue with subdomains. Again your reaction is just sort of knee-jerk exaggerated resistance to change, not actual real world problem cases.
  - wwweston 8y ago
    > Quite simply the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary. Sometimes it's unnecessary. How is it confusing? Millions of non-sophisticated users became sophisticated users typing it, millions more type it every day. It doesn't seem prima facie more confusing than a pronoun or other oft-repeated article. Consider the beginning of my last sentence in this paragraph -- would you consider the "It" confusing, even though it's not strictly necessary? > Again your reaction is just sort of knee-jerk exaggerated resistance to change Perhaps your reaction is knee-jerk teleology of change as progress? As a suggestion: maybe spend less time characterizing the approach of people that you disagree with on this topic, and more time articulating actual arguments ("the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary" counts, even though it's arguably not particularly strong), unless you'd eventually prefer it when people make the discussion partly about the shortcomings of your approach, which are far more glaring than you've clearly spent time considering.
schmichael 8y ago
> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general. I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me. It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so why do it? It seems just as plausible that it's only unusual subdomains that confuse users ("Is foobaz.example.com the same entity as example.com?!"), so hiding common ones might only make uncommon ones more confusing.
- theyinwhy 8y ago
  The behavior of safari is quite as bad and very confusing. Want to copy the url you see? Nope, you copied https as well. What you see is not what you get seems counter-intuitive imho.
- abalone 8y ago
  The comment you are responding to (mine) literally cites this answer: "As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that 'www.domain.com' and 'domain.com' are two different domains" It takes only a little bit of thought and empathy with the common user to imagine how this could be confusing. Are you supposed to type in www with every site? Why did it not work when I typed it in? Etc... It's just confusing and unnecessary.
  - schmichael 8y ago
    Welp I responded to the wrong comment. Sorry for the noise!
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    They're not changing whether you have to type it in. They're making it look like you didn't type it in when you did. This adds to the confusion you're complaining about, as the URL bar will look the same when you type in domain.com and it works as it does when you type in www.domain.com and it doesn't work.
TheKarateKid 8y ago
I agree. I can't remember the last time myself or anybody else actually typed "www." when going to a website. However, Chrome should handle this intelligently like it does with localhosts vs. internet hosts. If you manually type in "http://" http://" into the address bar (e.g "http://my-local-domain" http://my-local-domain"), it will not search the usual DNS and will honor any locally configured domains you may have on your network. This doesn't seem to be the case now with this 'www' concern, though. With slenk's example of http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org - the only way to access the second link properly is to click the link. Typing it in the address bar loads the same website as first link - so it appears Chrome is automatically adding 'www' or somehow making the request differently making the second link's page inaccessible via the address bar.
sandov 8y ago
What are the improvements of hiding part of the URL? >Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? My university doesn't work with example.com but does work with www.example.com. I see how someone could waste a lot of time trying to solve a nonexistent network issue because typing example.com doesn't work, but he had seen it working before.
sulkie 8y ago
Could you have not used a similar argument for AOL Keywords?
13415 8y ago
It's about as smart as hiding filename extensions, and the results will probably be similar. Increased confusion and more security risks.
- abalone 8y ago
  I agree with the first sentence. MacOS has hidden extensions for... ever? And MacOS is generally considered the easiest to use and most secure desktop OS. So there you go.
  - will4274 8y ago
    > And MacOS is generally considered the easiest to use and most secure desktop OS. Yup, that's why most non-technical users and also system administrators prefer it! (Oh wait, that's Windows and Linux)
stcredzero 8y ago
If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. The cost/benefit doesn't work out. It's a usability improvement, but it comes with a huge cost, where many, many sites have the fundamental function of a URL -- that of an address/specifier across the internet -- basically broken. The person who implemented this change either didn't work out the cost, or decided they didn't care. Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. How would you feel if primary keys in your database started to change their semantics? How would you feel if your phone started to change the telephone number it dialed? I guess we're kind of alright with the message app editing our messages as we type them. Now we're supposed to adapt to our tools, not the other way around, and insisting on tools doing what we say is "pedantry."
- abalone 8y ago
  Again you are shamelessly arguing "the principle of it all" without actual real world examples of problems.. Cite some real problems and we can have a more productive discussion. It doesn't help to falsely equate hiding "www." with corrupting phone numbers.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Cite some real problems and we can have a more productive discussion. Already cited elsewhere. It doesn't help to falsely equate hiding "www." with corrupting phone numbers. It's a valid comparison. Both are specifiers. It's the same sort of shenanigans with poorly planned "abbreviated" phone extension dialing and outside number prefixes in my company's office causing wrong numbers and accidental 911 dialing.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    Read the linked bug report. Concrete examples were given. A super glaring one to me is that: m.tumblr.com IS NOT a mobile version of tumblr.com If I tried, I could likely come up with a ton more, but so could you if you tried.
- baby 8y ago
  You are overestimating the cost. This is going to help kill the www on the long run.
feross 8y ago
This change goes far beyond merely hiding the "www." prefix. I'm not making up these examples: 1. "m.tumblr.com " and "tumblr.com " are BOTH displayed as "tumblr.com" even though they're literally different sites. 2. "www.example.www.example.com" displays as "example.example.com" which means all "www" subdomains, whether leading or not are being stripped out. 3. In the extreme case, "www.m.www.m.example.com" shows up as "example.com" which is pretty misleading. Usually, the Chrome team is very thoughtful about decisions that impact security. I'm surprised this was released in such a half-baked state. I hope this is not an indication of how Google's plan to "kill the URL" will work out.
- zbentley 8y ago
  If true, that's seriously concerning from a "detecting visual-similarity domain hijacking" security perspective.
- abalone 8y ago
  FWIW the Chromium agrees that 2 and 3 are bugs and will fix them.[1] 1 is by design though. Remember that they are only partially hidden; when you focus on the address bar it reveals the true address. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410#c18 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410...
  - qu4z-2 8y ago
    My understanding is that it's not when you focus it but when you attempt to edit it, either via double clicking or by moving the cursor.
kristopolous 8y ago
These types of usability steps disempower the user from having control. It doesn't surface what's actually happening and tries to "fix mistakes" with blunt overly-generalized presumptions. This isn't the first time it's happened. Take the https-everywhere changes. If you explicitly type something like "http://example.com.:80/" http://example.com.:80/" but the browser knows about an SSL cert for the domain, it will attempt to shuttle you off to https, failing to do the SSL handshake because of course it's port 80. Adding the protocol and the port isn't enough of a hint that I know what I'm trying to do. What's worse, this is a domain-wide setting. If you have say, local.example.com, the browser will try to protect you again. You have to go to an obscure preference and make the browser forget about this on a domain-by-domain basis, which will reset the next time it gets a wildcard SSL cert for the domain. This thing is of the same vain, it's the new Ctrl-Q of the browser world; a feature that, due to some dogmatic ideology, doesn't have a "knock off the bullshit" setting. Somehow irreversibly child-proofing software by making it not do what you tell it and hide important details has become fashionable, it's nonsense and needs to stop.
- abalone 8y ago
  You begin by criticizing those who would over-generalize, and then proceed to over-generalize by complaining about some SSL stuff. Again this is "the principle of it all" argumentation that doesn't cite any actual concrete real world issues with the change at hand.
  - kristopolous 8y ago
    I haven't used it yet so I can't cite any actual concrete real world problems it solves either. Are you claiming an attitude of hiding important technical details and creating dysfunctional smart systems in the name of usability doesn't exist? Or that these are unrelated things and the narrative arc isn't there? There's numerous other examples, such as the gtk3 file-chooser dialog which hid a number of important controls in the name of usability. What about mobile vendors, to make their devices friendly, remove a number of android customizations such as the ability to disable ambient display? What about sites like reddit who removed a number of features such as the ability to edit a comment on their mobile site as a UX improvement? Or what about the laptop vendors who remove keys such as Escape? It appears that all technologies are slowly tending towards an aspirational goal of being designed for illiterate toddlers. Luckily I know where this comes from. Illiterate toddlers, as it turns out, use lots of software on tablets and smartphones. Looking at usage metrics and presuming that everyone is a competent adult, efforts at user-error reduction tend towards humans with diapers and pacifiers as they make the most errors and any demographics statistics of those errors will false positive as their parents, since the infants don't have their own devices. Why do you think bright colors have better click thru rates for ads or using cartoon mascots or smiling men and women of child-rearing age increase inbound traffic and are seen as an important branding strategy for user engagement? Could it be toddlers tapping? Maybe that solves the problem of why these boosting effects only appear on mobile devices since 3-year olds can't operate a mouse. These trends give rise to design rules and "insights" which have a contagion effect on all software, just like the soft keyboard on the iphone led to the removal of physical keyboards from effectively all smartphones. Until every complex tool is dumbed down enough to be mastered by those who haven't learned primary colors or geometric shapes yet, this insanity will continue. Look at Youtube's recent redesign moves for example. They recommend the video you watched yesterday again and do so for weeks. The only people that want that are under the age of 6 who watch videos on loops. I'm confident they have strong empirical data mixed with the failure to properly segment users to back this decision up. Toddlers are controlling the direction of software and it needs to stop.
nixpulvis 8y ago
No this is Google (and others) attempting to fix confusion caused by developers making systems that are hard to understand for users. Nothing is stopping developers from redirecting or setting up DNS to make the two domains go to the same place. I personally feel like any negative user experience should be addressed by the developers of the website, not the browser. Meanwhile I'm sure there are people out there who want to maintain a distinction between www.x.y and just x.y.
- wingworks 8y ago
  Exactly, thank you! I think first and foremost the browser should be clear and easy to use for the general user, not an easy to debug frontend for devs, if we do that the browser will be a mess. Devs know where to look to see what the real address is if they get reports of there site not working, and can then fix the issue on their end. It's not like the issue isn't something that you can't change on the server end. The people who run the sites should do all they can to make the experience as hassle-free as possible. This means no www.domain.com and domain.com going to different places, 99% of users will expect to end up on the same site regardless of where you add the www or not, to them it's the same as adding the htttps or not, it should "just work" regardless what they put in the front on the URL. (of course there will always be some edges cases, but I feel it's worth it for a better end-user experience. IDK, just my 2c.
  - baby 8y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvotes but I agree with you here. I think this change is going to benefit both technical and non technical users. How many websites make the mistake of not handling www and non-www the same? Or having a valid certificate for both domains? It's not just a pain for the non techies
akira2501 8y ago
> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is a false dichotomy. There are tons of ways to improve the implementation without just hacking parts of the URL out of the "omnibar." You could split the omnibar and/or allow it to be resized so both pieces of information can be shown. You can use differential color highlighting and/or text formatting to convey which parts google considers "trusted." You could implement an "expert mode" button somewhere that turns all of these "improvements" off. You could add an extra field that shows security-critical information not just about the URL but about the resulting connection(s) to the host. This is hardly exhaustive, which is also a good description for Google's effort on this one.
- abalone 8y ago
  I appreciate your effort but I have to say, none of those are would remotely constitute usability improvements for the average user. Your proposals all involve increasing the complexity of the information presented to the user. This has been the root of bad UI for ages. The harder design decision, and what our industry has slowly gotten better at, is how to reduce information.
jlg23 8y ago
> Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. I do. Over and over again. Having been doing that for 2 decades, and with a limited budget, I require things like SNI[1] to work. But of course, I could just triple the tech budget... EDIT: And wrt "Time for a modicum of historical perspective." - please give it to me. I am keen to learn what I did wrong all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
- abalone 8y ago
  And how does this break SNI? It's just a UI change.
anfilt 8y ago
I don't know what ISP does, but good on them for helping their customers.
wwweston 8y ago
> They don't see the positives because they're technically advanced enough and don't benefit from simplification (or so they think). I'm noticing despite the invocation of vague concepts of progress and usability... you haven't articulated any particular case for how this represents either. No model for why it's simpler or more usable. "Safari does this too" or imprecise aspersions about the supposed "whining and griping from the more technically advanced folks" doesn't really cut it. I could guess that what you mean is "oh, if you can omit something and yet it's implicitly understood, obviously that's a simplification," though that's obviously a guess. If I've misunderstood, well, there's counterexample #1, to get a little meta. If I've managed to guess correctly, the broad topic of language and notation is a fairly rich well as to the potential for ambiguity or outright miscommunicated meaning when things are moved from consistent and explicitly denoted syntax to implicit syntax. Or examples for when the implicitly understood isn't particularly burdensome to use or even require in some cases. "the world didn't end" .... lots of bad ideas that make things marginally worse don't end the world. "the principle of it all" Again, this is a pretty vague and imprecise charge. Do you understand what the particular principles people are registering their objection on? If so, why not name them and respond?
- abalone 8y ago
  > I'm noticing despite the invocation of vague concepts of progress and usability... you haven't articulated any particular case for how this represents either. I literally began my comment by citing this: ‘As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains...’ It takes only a very small amount of thought and empathy with the average user to understand how the extraneous www prefix can be confusing. It can lead to failures like thinking you have to use it with every website. It enables fraud by making “wwwexample.com” look more normal. Etc. Your comment is a textbook example of “the principle of it all” argumentation. You cite no concrete examples of problems caused by hiding www from the UI. Not that we should expect none, but the right conversation to have is whether the usability benefits outweigh them. Not technical pedantry or “vague and imprecise” warnings about what may come if we let this pass.
  - 8y ago
JoshMnem 8y ago
Safari's URL masking is doing a terrible disservice to society by making people ignorant. Make the Web more usable by educating people, not by hiding basic information from everyone.
muraiki 8y ago
The thing is, there are people who care about usability for whom this is not "clearly" an improvement. If it was clear, we wouldn't be having this gigantic discussion...

slenk 8y ago

Two prominent examples noted in the bug: https://citibank.com.sg https://citibank.com.sg and https://www.citibank.com.sg https://www.citibank.com.sg are different, http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org are different. Like, big companies run separate servers on the two domains. That's besides the fact where if you have www.example.www.example.com, it rewrites to example.example.com.

DougBTX 8y ago
The first citibank url doesn’t load for me, so it is site vs not site rather than two different sites, and both those ntp urls are redirecting me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ https://www.ntppool.org/en/ - perhaps there’s less substance than meets the eye to those complaints.
- hrez 8y ago
  user1 - https://citibank.com.sg https://citibank.com.sg doesn't work for me user2 - it's fine, here is a screenshot of it working (while showing "beautified" https://www.citibank.com.sg https://www.citibank.com.sg) how is that not confusing?
  - wingworks 8y ago
    I think it's more on the website owners to fix their sites, users expect domain.com to be the same/auto-redirected to www.domain.com or vice versa. I think it's a good thing what Chrome is doing, it will push website owners to correctly set up their domain redirects and in the end, lessen end-user confusion.
    - jake_the_third 8y ago
      No, users expect to type what they see in the address bar, and get the same result every time. Can we even call them address bars anymore? And blaming website owners for working within the bounds of published standards is ridiculous and you know it.
      - justadudeama 8y ago
        If I asked any non-technical person under the age of 20 the difference between www.google.com and google.com they probably couldn't tell me. Users expect www.example.com to equal example.com. If a website isn't redirecting one to the other, they, are doing something that is incredibly anti-user and it is a good thing that google/apple are forcing them to do it different.
        Jedd 8y ago
        > If I asked any non-technical person under the age of 20 ... Which is why technical specifications aren't written or maintained by non-technical people.
        jake_the_third 8y ago
TheKarateKid 8y ago
Just because a major bank and government organization use an unusual domain configuration, it doesn't mean that it is good practice.
- tazard 8y ago
  And just because it's not a good practice doesn't mean that making both www and non www version look the same to the user and having it "just randomly not load" is a step forward for usability.
- joan_lm 8y ago
  but showing an incorrect url is a bad practice
ender7 8y ago
So citibank and NTP will need to change their domain structure. That's okay: those are confusing structures. This is a tradeoff -- continuing to support already-confusing differences is not worth the loss of the ease-of-use gain referenced in the grandparent.
- LocalH 8y ago
  It seems like the Internet is moving more to a "centralized" design where certain actors have decided "well, here's how we're going to do things now, deal with it". The golden age of the Internet is already dead, guys. We're unfortunately over the hump.
  - zipotm 8y ago
    EXACTLY!
jsjohnst 8y ago
Also noted in the bug: m.tumblr.com IS NOT a mobile variant of tumblr.com I kinda wished I had that blog now so I could put a proof of concept up to show why this is a very bad idea from a phishing perspective.

redleggedfrog 8y ago

Yes, this point is important. We need to get the web/internet as simple as changing channels on a television. That is what the masses are capable of.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
How does hiding part of the domain make the web any easier to use?
- basch 8y ago
  if anything, it should be time to declare that its a bit insane to expect lay people to be able to read from right to left and left to right concurrently, and understand all the delimiting punctuation correctly, along with unicode. its time to restructure url rendering to be right to left, and combine delimiters. dashes, periods, slashes, and subdomains and hundreds of tlds have made it too confusing. https://www.google.com./ https://www.google.com./ should become either https/com/google/www/ OR secure/com/google/www/ OR secure.com.google.www. Browsers can then just always bold the third word?
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Why even bother with URL language? It should just be 'Google Search' in the bar and you can see the URL if you want.
    - jeena 8y ago
      I have many websites which I don't let Google to index, how would my users access them?
      - hmage 8y ago
        If you're not in Google's index, then it's likely you're not in Google's interest to use Google's product to visit your site, since the company prefers if you use their search rather than type links directly or follow links from other links, hence they want to kill the URL — https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

daveFNbuck 8y ago

How is this a usability improvement? What are the positives I'm not seeing?

mirko22 8y ago

and that’s why they are marketing companies not technical companies...

parliament32 8y ago

What exactly is the usability improvement from hiding part of the domain name? Maybe we should be hiding ".com" because that's trivial too? Better yet, why show "google" at all if from the page it's clear you're on Google? Might as well just fullscreen the content pane and be done with it.

abalone 8y ago
> What exactly is the usability improvement from hiding part of the domain name? Quite simply the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary. See comment from the ISP admin I cited re: user training. > Maybe we should be hiding ".com" because that's trivial too? Better yet, why show "google" at all if from the page it's clear you're on Google? Those aren't really serious counterexamples. ".com" is obviously not trivial; there are plenty of TLD variants in use. It is approximately 0.0000000001% as common to run separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com. And clearly different domains can spoof one another's content so that's not a way to be "clear" you're on google.com, whereas this is not generally an issue with subdomains. Again your reaction is just sort of knee-jerk exaggerated resistance to change, not actual real world problem cases.
- wwweston 8y ago
  > Quite simply the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary. Sometimes it's unnecessary. How is it confusing? Millions of non-sophisticated users became sophisticated users typing it, millions more type it every day. It doesn't seem prima facie more confusing than a pronoun or other oft-repeated article. Consider the beginning of my last sentence in this paragraph -- would you consider the "It" confusing, even though it's not strictly necessary? > Again your reaction is just sort of knee-jerk exaggerated resistance to change Perhaps your reaction is knee-jerk teleology of change as progress? As a suggestion: maybe spend less time characterizing the approach of people that you disagree with on this topic, and more time articulating actual arguments ("the www subdomain is confusing and unnecessary" counts, even though it's arguably not particularly strong), unless you'd eventually prefer it when people make the discussion partly about the shortcomings of your approach, which are far more glaring than you've clearly spent time considering.

schmichael 8y ago

> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general. I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me. It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so why do it? It seems just as plausible that it's only unusual subdomains that confuse users ("Is foobaz.example.com the same entity as example.com?!"), so hiding common ones might only make uncommon ones more confusing.

theyinwhy 8y ago
The behavior of safari is quite as bad and very confusing. Want to copy the url you see? Nope, you copied https as well. What you see is not what you get seems counter-intuitive imho.
abalone 8y ago
The comment you are responding to (mine) literally cites this answer: "As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that 'www.domain.com' and 'domain.com' are two different domains" It takes only a little bit of thought and empathy with the common user to imagine how this could be confusing. Are you supposed to type in www with every site? Why did it not work when I typed it in? Etc... It's just confusing and unnecessary.
- schmichael 8y ago
  Welp I responded to the wrong comment. Sorry for the noise!
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  They're not changing whether you have to type it in. They're making it look like you didn't type it in when you did. This adds to the confusion you're complaining about, as the URL bar will look the same when you type in domain.com and it works as it does when you type in www.domain.com and it doesn't work.

TheKarateKid 8y ago

I agree. I can't remember the last time myself or anybody else actually typed "www." when going to a website. However, Chrome should handle this intelligently like it does with localhosts vs. internet hosts. If you manually type in "http://" http://" into the address bar (e.g "http://my-local-domain" http://my-local-domain"), it will not search the usual DNS and will honor any locally configured domains you may have on your network. This doesn't seem to be the case now with this 'www' concern, though. With slenk's example of http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org and http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org - the only way to access the second link properly is to click the link. Typing it in the address bar loads the same website as first link - so it appears Chrome is automatically adding 'www' or somehow making the request differently making the second link's page inaccessible via the address bar.

sandov 8y ago

What are the improvements of hiding part of the URL? >Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? My university doesn't work with example.com but does work with www.example.com. I see how someone could waste a lot of time trying to solve a nonexistent network issue because typing example.com doesn't work, but he had seen it working before.

sulkie 8y ago

Could you have not used a similar argument for AOL Keywords?

13415 8y ago

It's about as smart as hiding filename extensions, and the results will probably be similar. Increased confusion and more security risks.

abalone 8y ago
I agree with the first sentence. MacOS has hidden extensions for... ever? And MacOS is generally considered the easiest to use and most secure desktop OS. So there you go.
- will4274 8y ago
  > And MacOS is generally considered the easiest to use and most secure desktop OS. Yup, that's why most non-technical users and also system administrators prefer it! (Oh wait, that's Windows and Linux)

stcredzero 8y ago

If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. The cost/benefit doesn't work out. It's a usability improvement, but it comes with a huge cost, where many, many sites have the fundamental function of a URL -- that of an address/specifier across the internet -- basically broken. The person who implemented this change either didn't work out the cost, or decided they didn't care. Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. How would you feel if primary keys in your database started to change their semantics? How would you feel if your phone started to change the telephone number it dialed? I guess we're kind of alright with the message app editing our messages as we type them. Now we're supposed to adapt to our tools, not the other way around, and insisting on tools doing what we say is "pedantry."

abalone 8y ago
Again you are shamelessly arguing "the principle of it all" without actual real world examples of problems.. Cite some real problems and we can have a more productive discussion. It doesn't help to falsely equate hiding "www." with corrupting phone numbers.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Cite some real problems and we can have a more productive discussion. Already cited elsewhere. It doesn't help to falsely equate hiding "www." with corrupting phone numbers. It's a valid comparison. Both are specifiers. It's the same sort of shenanigans with poorly planned "abbreviated" phone extension dialing and outside number prefixes in my company's office causing wrong numbers and accidental 911 dialing.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Read the linked bug report. Concrete examples were given. A super glaring one to me is that: m.tumblr.com IS NOT a mobile version of tumblr.com If I tried, I could likely come up with a ton more, but so could you if you tried.
baby 8y ago
You are overestimating the cost. This is going to help kill the www on the long run.

feross 8y ago

This change goes far beyond merely hiding the "www." prefix. I'm not making up these examples: 1. "m.tumblr.com " and "tumblr.com " are BOTH displayed as "tumblr.com" even though they're literally different sites. 2. "www.example.www.example.com" displays as "example.example.com" which means all "www" subdomains, whether leading or not are being stripped out. 3. In the extreme case, "www.m.www.m.example.com" shows up as "example.com" which is pretty misleading. Usually, the Chrome team is very thoughtful about decisions that impact security. I'm surprised this was released in such a half-baked state. I hope this is not an indication of how Google's plan to "kill the URL" will work out.

zbentley 8y ago
If true, that's seriously concerning from a "detecting visual-similarity domain hijacking" security perspective.
abalone 8y ago
FWIW the Chromium agrees that 2 and 3 are bugs and will fix them.[1] 1 is by design though. Remember that they are only partially hidden; when you focus on the address bar it reveals the true address. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410#c18 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410...
- qu4z-2 8y ago
  My understanding is that it's not when you focus it but when you attempt to edit it, either via double clicking or by moving the cursor.

kristopolous 8y ago

These types of usability steps disempower the user from having control. It doesn't surface what's actually happening and tries to "fix mistakes" with blunt overly-generalized presumptions. This isn't the first time it's happened. Take the https-everywhere changes. If you explicitly type something like "http://example.com.:80/" http://example.com.:80/" but the browser knows about an SSL cert for the domain, it will attempt to shuttle you off to https, failing to do the SSL handshake because of course it's port 80. Adding the protocol and the port isn't enough of a hint that I know what I'm trying to do. What's worse, this is a domain-wide setting. If you have say, local.example.com, the browser will try to protect you again. You have to go to an obscure preference and make the browser forget about this on a domain-by-domain basis, which will reset the next time it gets a wildcard SSL cert for the domain. This thing is of the same vain, it's the new Ctrl-Q of the browser world; a feature that, due to some dogmatic ideology, doesn't have a "knock off the bullshit" setting. Somehow irreversibly child-proofing software by making it not do what you tell it and hide important details has become fashionable, it's nonsense and needs to stop.

abalone 8y ago
You begin by criticizing those who would over-generalize, and then proceed to over-generalize by complaining about some SSL stuff. Again this is "the principle of it all" argumentation that doesn't cite any actual concrete real world issues with the change at hand.
- kristopolous 8y ago
  I haven't used it yet so I can't cite any actual concrete real world problems it solves either. Are you claiming an attitude of hiding important technical details and creating dysfunctional smart systems in the name of usability doesn't exist? Or that these are unrelated things and the narrative arc isn't there? There's numerous other examples, such as the gtk3 file-chooser dialog which hid a number of important controls in the name of usability. What about mobile vendors, to make their devices friendly, remove a number of android customizations such as the ability to disable ambient display? What about sites like reddit who removed a number of features such as the ability to edit a comment on their mobile site as a UX improvement? Or what about the laptop vendors who remove keys such as Escape? It appears that all technologies are slowly tending towards an aspirational goal of being designed for illiterate toddlers. Luckily I know where this comes from. Illiterate toddlers, as it turns out, use lots of software on tablets and smartphones. Looking at usage metrics and presuming that everyone is a competent adult, efforts at user-error reduction tend towards humans with diapers and pacifiers as they make the most errors and any demographics statistics of those errors will false positive as their parents, since the infants don't have their own devices. Why do you think bright colors have better click thru rates for ads or using cartoon mascots or smiling men and women of child-rearing age increase inbound traffic and are seen as an important branding strategy for user engagement? Could it be toddlers tapping? Maybe that solves the problem of why these boosting effects only appear on mobile devices since 3-year olds can't operate a mouse. These trends give rise to design rules and "insights" which have a contagion effect on all software, just like the soft keyboard on the iphone led to the removal of physical keyboards from effectively all smartphones. Until every complex tool is dumbed down enough to be mastered by those who haven't learned primary colors or geometric shapes yet, this insanity will continue. Look at Youtube's recent redesign moves for example. They recommend the video you watched yesterday again and do so for weeks. The only people that want that are under the age of 6 who watch videos on loops. I'm confident they have strong empirical data mixed with the failure to properly segment users to back this decision up. Toddlers are controlling the direction of software and it needs to stop.

nixpulvis 8y ago

No this is Google (and others) attempting to fix confusion caused by developers making systems that are hard to understand for users. Nothing is stopping developers from redirecting or setting up DNS to make the two domains go to the same place. I personally feel like any negative user experience should be addressed by the developers of the website, not the browser. Meanwhile I'm sure there are people out there who want to maintain a distinction between www.x.y and just x.y.

wingworks 8y ago
Exactly, thank you! I think first and foremost the browser should be clear and easy to use for the general user, not an easy to debug frontend for devs, if we do that the browser will be a mess. Devs know where to look to see what the real address is if they get reports of there site not working, and can then fix the issue on their end. It's not like the issue isn't something that you can't change on the server end. The people who run the sites should do all they can to make the experience as hassle-free as possible. This means no www.domain.com and domain.com going to different places, 99% of users will expect to end up on the same site regardless of where you add the www or not, to them it's the same as adding the htttps or not, it should "just work" regardless what they put in the front on the URL. (of course there will always be some edges cases, but I feel it's worth it for a better end-user experience. IDK, just my 2c.
- baby 8y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvotes but I agree with you here. I think this change is going to benefit both technical and non technical users. How many websites make the mistake of not handling www and non-www the same? Or having a valid certificate for both domains? It's not just a pain for the non techies

akira2501 8y ago

> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is a false dichotomy. There are tons of ways to improve the implementation without just hacking parts of the URL out of the "omnibar." You could split the omnibar and/or allow it to be resized so both pieces of information can be shown. You can use differential color highlighting and/or text formatting to convey which parts google considers "trusted." You could implement an "expert mode" button somewhere that turns all of these "improvements" off. You could add an extra field that shows security-critical information not just about the URL but about the resulting connection(s) to the host. This is hardly exhaustive, which is also a good description for Google's effort on this one.

abalone 8y ago
I appreciate your effort but I have to say, none of those are would remotely constitute usability improvements for the average user. Your proposals all involve increasing the complexity of the information presented to the user. This has been the root of bad UI for ages. The harder design decision, and what our industry has slowly gotten better at, is how to reduce information.

jlg23 8y ago

> Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. I do. Over and over again. Having been doing that for 2 decades, and with a limited budget, I require things like SNI[1] to work. But of course, I could just triple the tech budget... EDIT: And wrt "Time for a modicum of historical perspective." - please give it to me. I am keen to learn what I did wrong all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

abalone 8y ago
And how does this break SNI? It's just a UI change.

anfilt 8y ago

I don't know what ISP does, but good on them for helping their customers.

wwweston 8y ago

> They don't see the positives because they're technically advanced enough and don't benefit from simplification (or so they think). I'm noticing despite the invocation of vague concepts of progress and usability... you haven't articulated any particular case for how this represents either. No model for why it's simpler or more usable. "Safari does this too" or imprecise aspersions about the supposed "whining and griping from the more technically advanced folks" doesn't really cut it. I could guess that what you mean is "oh, if you can omit something and yet it's implicitly understood, obviously that's a simplification," though that's obviously a guess. If I've misunderstood, well, there's counterexample #1, to get a little meta. If I've managed to guess correctly, the broad topic of language and notation is a fairly rich well as to the potential for ambiguity or outright miscommunicated meaning when things are moved from consistent and explicitly denoted syntax to implicit syntax. Or examples for when the implicitly understood isn't particularly burdensome to use or even require in some cases. "the world didn't end" .... lots of bad ideas that make things marginally worse don't end the world. "the principle of it all" Again, this is a pretty vague and imprecise charge. Do you understand what the particular principles people are registering their objection on? If so, why not name them and respond?

abalone 8y ago
> I'm noticing despite the invocation of vague concepts of progress and usability... you haven't articulated any particular case for how this represents either. I literally began my comment by citing this: ‘As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains...’ It takes only a very small amount of thought and empathy with the average user to understand how the extraneous www prefix can be confusing. It can lead to failures like thinking you have to use it with every website. It enables fraud by making “wwwexample.com” look more normal. Etc. Your comment is a textbook example of “the principle of it all” argumentation. You cite no concrete examples of problems caused by hiding www from the UI. Not that we should expect none, but the right conversation to have is whether the usability benefits outweigh them. Not technical pedantry or “vague and imprecise” warnings about what may come if we let this pass.
- 8y ago

JoshMnem 8y ago

Safari's URL masking is doing a terrible disservice to society by making people ignorant. Make the Web more usable by educating people, not by hiding basic information from everyone.

muraiki 8y ago

The thing is, there are people who care about usability for whom this is not "clearly" an improvement. If it was clear, we wouldn't be having this gigantic discussion...