* The domain part of a URL is a critical security indicator.
* The shorter and simpler this indicator is, the more chance users will understand and trust it.
* Very few users trust www.yahoo.com while not trusting yahoo.com.
* If we assume that users who trust www.domain.com also trust domain.com and vice versa, we can remove the "www." from the UI, creating a shorter, simpler and more understandable security token.
> We do not plan to standardize how browsers should treat these special cases in their UI
This is a statement from the Chrome team; from Google. Since when does Google unilaterally decide on what it will or will not standardise in other browsers?
Standardisation is a multi-stakeholder collaborative process. This sounds very much like Google representatives don't view it as such. Given their dominant market position, that's a worrying sign.
The context doesn't change the meaning. The previous sentence talks about engaging in a (separate, different) standardisation process with others, and this sentence then does a jarring context switch by instead talking about a seemingly unilateral action (albeit thankfully in the negative, so only the tone is of concern).
No, the sentence in question is—and the context you are dismissig makes this abundantly clear, though it is also the most natural reading of the sentence in isolation, IMO—using “standardize” to mean “seek to establish as an industry standard through the process of a standards body.”
(Note that while I think the language is clear, I think this whole approach from Google is ill-conceived to the point of borderline lunacy; there is no need for these to be special-case subdomains or for them to be treated specially by UIs at all.)
They've added a feature nobody asked for, so there must be another hidden reason why they've decided to add this. Any ideas? Is this really just a "UX enhancement", or is there a bigger strategy behind it?
If only HTTP supported SRV records so people could use bare domain (google.com) in the UI while serving content transparently from other hosts. Many protocols use that (e.g. XMPP). But no, it seems to be easier to stick to www CNAME "hack" and fix it by introducing even more hacks like this "www elision".
>There is more community consensus that sites should not allow the “www” subdomain to be user controlled.
Is there any record of this "consensus"? This shouldn't be happening, period. There is a difference between example.com and www.example.com: they can serve different content, and can have different DNS records. There is literally no sane reason to hide any subdomain, common or not -- it's there for a reason.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadThese are not special-case subdomains, they are simply subdomains...
* The domain part of a URL is a critical security indicator.
* The shorter and simpler this indicator is, the more chance users will understand and trust it.
* Very few users trust www.yahoo.com while not trusting yahoo.com.
* If we assume that users who trust www.domain.com also trust domain.com and vice versa, we can remove the "www." from the UI, creating a shorter, simpler and more understandable security token.
Except when it's not.
https://www.schrauger.com/the-story-of-how-wosign-gave-me-an...
http://freedns.afraid.org/
This is a statement from the Chrome team; from Google. Since when does Google unilaterally decide on what it will or will not standardise in other browsers?
Standardisation is a multi-stakeholder collaborative process. This sounds very much like Google representatives don't view it as such. Given their dominant market position, that's a worrying sign.
(Note that while I think the language is clear, I think this whole approach from Google is ill-conceived to the point of borderline lunacy; there is no need for these to be special-case subdomains or for them to be treated specially by UIs at all.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972
Is there any record of this "consensus"? This shouldn't be happening, period. There is a difference between example.com and www.example.com: they can serve different content, and can have different DNS records. There is literally no sane reason to hide any subdomain, common or not -- it's there for a reason.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972
Putting style before substance.
To disable the annoying behaviour:
chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains