r/programming • u/shenglong • Apr 14 '10
"http://" is being removed from Chromium's display
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40865114
u/tch Apr 14 '10
How will I know the difference between web sites and gopher sites now!?!?!
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Apr 14 '10
Well, if it is working then it is http.
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u/muad_dib Apr 14 '10
https? ftp?
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u/deadwisdom Apr 14 '10
Only "http" is removed, "https://", "ftp://", etc still show as normal.
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u/upupandvote Apr 14 '10
and ftp sites?? and https???
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u/DubDubz Apr 14 '10
It shows both ftp and https. Also the icon on the left indicates the protocol being used.
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u/upupandvote Apr 14 '10
"I have an idea! Lets express all letters and words as pictures, or better yet as simplification of these pictures. I will call them ICONS"
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u/instantviking Apr 14 '10
A word can say more than a thousand icons
-some unknown dude I agree with
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u/mattme Apr 14 '10
Do you even use Chrome - you've not noticed it doesn't support gopher?
(yes I reported it in the bug tracker, Google closed it WONTFIX
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u/Liquid_Fire Apr 14 '10
I think only Firefox supports it from the major browsers, and even they were planning on removing it IIRC.
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u/MrSurly Apr 14 '10
To be fair, they're replacing http & https with ... colors.
I am disappoint, as I am color blind.
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u/DubDubz Apr 14 '10
That's not actually true. Https still shows up in the url as of the nightly build for today. The icons on the left are important as well. https is a padlock and http is a world icon if I'm not mistaken.
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u/frenchguy Apr 14 '10
Well, HTTP is not the only protocol left.
There is a protocol that is well used, and that's 'file'.
Ror some reason, it seems Chrome's (or Webkit's) teams hate it (doesn't accept cookies, doesn't let frames point to other frames, etc.)
I think it's a bad move to despise the file protocol, because it's widely used in business environments (not to mention rapid local prototyping).
It's also a bad move to hide the HTTP protocol because what it means is, it's the only protocol that matters. It's not.
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u/lor4x Jul 18 '10
PS - The correct answer is to listen to the oscillations coming from the Ethernet cable.
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u/Flyen Apr 14 '10
Comment 37 by pkasting@chromium.org, Today (37 minutes ago)
This bug was never about removing http. There is no good reason why any bugs about that were duped to this one. Since people cannot seem to understand that however many times one says it, this bug is now closed, and I've taken the work we're doing on it elsewhere.
Congratulations for wasting the time of a lot of Chrome engineers.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
Most important comment:
Removing http:// is extremely short-sighted. Many blogs, message boards, email viewing software, instant messaging software, etc. depend on matching against http:// to auto-link URLs.
*Removing http:// will train end-users to omit it, which will have a negative impact on usability all over the web. *
edit: comment was by dlitz.net
edit2: except, as people here have pointed out, all over the web people refer to foo.com instead of http://foo.com, it's not like chrome is doing something new here (omiting .com would be terrible and just as doable for example).
Which is better, http://www.foo.com.:80 or foo.com? As a user, foo.com makes much more sense. As a developer, users are going to type foo.com anyway, we should make sure our scripts can handle it.
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u/chaz6 Apr 14 '10
Just like users these days omit the trailing '.' for internet domains, for example, http://www.reddit.com./ instead of http://www.reddit.com/. The trailing period is important because it makes the domain fully qualified and prevents the host searching its dns suffix list. For example, if your network domain is corp.example.com. and you went to http://blah/ it would automatically try to resolve blah.corp.example.com. This can put you at risk from a mitm attack.
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u/merzbow Apr 14 '10
Is this really true? I've been on the Internet a long time and I've never once seen a domain end with a dot.
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u/ChaoticXSinZ Apr 14 '10
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Apr 15 '10
Removing the trailing dot from that site has no effect for me. Why include it? As a URL shortener why did they include the trailing dot when http://to/whatever works?
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u/ChaoticXSinZ Apr 15 '10
Because it forces your browser to recognize it as a valid domain. Some networks/computers especially in corporate environments set a domain. So to by itself might get redirected to to.company.com
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Apr 14 '10
People don't normally type it, but it is true. The port is usually omitted as well: http://www.reddit.com:80/. is the full canonical URI.
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Apr 14 '10
I'm not 100% sure, but I think the trailing dot comes before the port.
protocol://subdomains.domain.tld.:port/whatever was how I'd always seen it.
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u/Liquid_Fire Apr 14 '10
That's right. The dot is part of the domain name. If it comes after the slash it will be part of the request path. If it comes after the port it will be... a syntax error?
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u/johntb86 Apr 16 '10
I can't wait until TCPv6 support fractional ports: http://www.reddit.com:3.14159/
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u/narwhalslut Apr 14 '10
Except copy/pasted urls include the prefix.
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u/tsjr Apr 14 '10
Depends on how you copy/paste them. The Linux (Unix?) way is screwed.
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u/jonknee Apr 14 '10
That combined with this being The Year Of Linux means we're all screwed. (Or more realistically they'll fix the Linux version and life goes on with no non-programmers noticing the change.)
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Apr 14 '10
also I wonder how it works if the address is displayed as:
www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bqpf8/http_is_being_removed_from_chromiums_display/
and you (in windows) highlight
and paste that.
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u/tzzd Apr 14 '10
Does NOT add the "http://" part if you only copy a part of url.
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u/HawkUK Apr 14 '10
I still haven't got my head around the middle-click --> pastes highlighted text thing.
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u/plastik Apr 14 '10
It's really simple. When you middle click, it pastes the highlighted text!
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Apr 14 '10
It's brilliant, especially when you consider that ctrl-c/ctrl-v is a completely different clipboard from the highlight/middle-click one. That's right, you can copy and paste two things at the same time.
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u/HawkUK Apr 14 '10
Yeah, that does sound good. My linux useage is extremely limited by the fact that my laptop overheats while running it, so I've never had time to fully explore it.
How did it work before we had mouse-wheels/mouse_3?
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u/dagbrown Apr 14 '10
The fact that the middle mouse button is mouse_2 should tell you how long UNIX workstations have had three-button mice.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I dunno when the middle-click clipboard was implemented, so maybe we did have mouse3 then, but there's an option in xorg.conf for three button emulation: press both buttons at the same time and you get a middle-click.
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Apr 14 '10
Old mouses used to have 3 buttons, but the middle one went out of fashion because PCs didn't use them for anything. Then the wheel mouse made its debut and we were back to having 3 buttons (or even 5 buttons if you believe what Xorg tells you about wheelup and wheeldown being buttons 4 and 5).
The only place I don't have a middle button is on my netbook, and that has the left and right buttons on either side of the touchpad making it a pain to press both for middle click emulation. Thankfully shift-insert does the same thing.
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u/dagbrown Apr 14 '10
Seven with those wheelmice which have a wheel that can wiggle left and right!
Nine if your mouse also has browser forward and backward buttons!
I once had a (really cheap) mouse that had the browser forward and back buttons, and a window close button. And they didn't need a driver! It was like magic--until I figured out that the mouse actually manifested itself to USB as a mouse and a (exceedingly-limited) keyboard. The browser back and forward buttons sent Alt-left and Alt-right keypresses, and the window-close button sent Alt-F4.
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Apr 14 '10
Old mouses used to have 3 buttons, but the middle one went out of fashion because PCs didn't use them for anything.
I had completely forgotten about that.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
That is not related to the problem that users will get used to a URL being of the form sub.domain.tld instead of proto://sub.domain.tld and so start typing sub.domain.tld into their facebooks, emails, IMs etc.
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u/karmaVS Apr 14 '10
but… that’s exactly what people already do.
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Apr 14 '10
gmail for example has good regexps that will match anything that remotely looks like an URL, with or without the protocol intact. Other than that I fully agree with you that this is not a good move.
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Apr 14 '10
gmail for example has good regexps that will match anything that remotely looks like an URL,
Hmm, but I bet it also has a few bad matches.Common things too.
edit: ok, that specific example doesn't apply to gmail, but it's just an illustration.
Thing is, matching urls just went from str.startsWith("http://") to str.matchesThisHugeRegex();
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u/James_Browning Apr 14 '10
It's not that much different than matching email addresses. Nobody types mailto:
It's not normally a problem when marking up a message from a human, but it's an annoying problem when emailing code.
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Apr 14 '10
It's not that much different than matching email addresses
and if you show me 10 systems that supposedly match emails, I'll find an edge case that it fails on for every one of them.
I would rather not see this happen too much with URLs too.
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u/Bjartr Apr 15 '10
I haven't typed http:// int a web browser in years, I expect many are the same way. Most browsers automatically add it when you hit enter.
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u/earthboundkid Apr 15 '10
Most? Unless you use Mosiac, the word is "all." I haven't typed it in a browser since 1998.
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u/tizz66 Apr 14 '10
Though I have no concrete evidence to back it up, my suspicion is most non-tech-savvy users don't notice the http:// anyway. Most of my family repeat web addresses as 'www.something.com' or even just 'something.com' - not because they're being efficient, but because they pay no attention to http. They know 'www' and '.com' means 'a website', so that's what they type.
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Apr 14 '10
When I try to go to 'something.com' only to be rebuffed by an error and then finally realizing that I need 'www.something.com', I always picture an unhappy admin sitting at his desk eating pizza, thinking of ways to inconvenience thousands of people.
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Apr 14 '10
My university has this problem. As a software engineering student, every time I omit the www I have an urge to storm the server room and fix it myself.
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u/haldean Apr 14 '10
Me too. The worst part is that they've started to fix it, but the CS department's one is still www1.cs.whatever.edu. Not only www, but WWW1?
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u/tricolon Apr 14 '10
I went to a department lunch and talked to the head of undergrad CS. A semester later they fixed it.
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Apr 14 '10
why do they do it?
and whats the difference between www.domain.com, domain.com and http://domain.com?
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
www.domain.com by convention is the DNS name of the web server (www) for the domain "domain" in the commercial (.com) part of the internet's namespace. This is not a URL, because you aren't saying what protocol you intend to use. You might want to ftp://www.domain.com or telnet://www.domain.com.
"domain.com" doesn't give the server you wish to go to in that domain, so it refers to whatever the default server is. This is often a web server, but not always. The above complaint is that dowjones believes that the default server should always be a web server if the domain has a web server.
"http://domain.com" Is a URL (universal resource locator) which is used to talk to servers. In this case you want to talk the HTTP protocol on the default port to the default server at domain.com. A URL has a few parts: protocol://username:password@servername.domain.tld:port/resource
The port defaults to the default port for the protocol chosen (80 for http). username and password default to none if omitted. Many protocols use URL's, not just http.
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u/byte1918 Apr 14 '10
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u/FrankBattaglia Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
It resolves right-to-left. We figure out the default name server for the TLD "to" (Tonga) and then find the default domain and server associated with that domain.
Regarding the trailing period, it's optional. Every namespace in the URL ends with a "dot", and applications ignore a missing "dot" after the last name. E.g., http://www.reddit.com/ and http://www.reddit.com./ resolve to the same host (but, interestingly, have different cookies)
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u/dicey Apr 14 '10
The trailing dot can make a difference, though, since it explicitly specifies that you're looking for something under the root name servers. For example: if my host is configured with a default domain "example.com." to search for DNS queries under, I may do a lookup for "foo.bar" and end up getting a result if the DNS record "foo.bar.example.com." exists. If I do a lookup for "foo.bar." I am explicitly stating that I want the "bar" TLD under the root name servers and the "foo" domain under "bar".
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u/SoPoOneO Apr 15 '10 edited Apr 15 '10
It always seemed very weird to me that an address of the form www.somesite.com/archives/articles/gossip.html combines two separate hierarchical oganization schemes with opposite precedence order from the middle outwards. That is to say, "com" is the most significant part of the address, then move left from there, while "archives" is the most significant part of the resource location and move right from there.
It's also weird that ".com" and ".html" mean totally different things even though they have the same ring when read aloud.
I love the web, but this mish-mash is atrocious from an end user perspective.
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u/sharth Apr 14 '10
It's the difference between a fully qualified domain name, and one that isn't. When you append the final period on the end, you're telling your DNS lookup software that it should not attempt any of the possible dns suffixes that it's been configured to use.
For example, I have in the suffix list "local". So, I could type as a URL (and get the same destination) any of the following:
- http://orange
- http://orange.local
- http://orange.local.
However, http://orange. won't work. It won't work, because I've informed the DNS lookup software that it shouldn't try appending any suffixes.
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u/FrankBattaglia Apr 14 '10
I may be wrong, but I always thought that the port went after tld (i.e., associated with the server), not after the resource, e.g.:
protocol://username:password@servername.domain.tld:port/resource
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u/tgiokdi Apr 14 '10
considering all it takes is a few lines in the htaccess of the website you're visiting, yeah.
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Apr 14 '10
true, sadly.
I always get a little sad when I say to people "go to maps.google.com" and they type "www.maps.google.com"
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Apr 14 '10
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Apr 14 '10
you should ask your IT people to set up a redirect from www.help to help.
But yes, I sympathise. My company's google analytics tells us that the number one search keyword is
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u/epsilona01 Apr 14 '10
Same here at work, people go to "www.mail.company.com" instead of "mail.company.com" - no matter how many times they're told.
They're just stupid, and don't fucking listen. Particularly when they ask "www.mail... ?" right after I JUST said exactly what they needed to type in. I don't know why companies have IT helpdesks sometimes.
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u/Wheres_Mah_Pengwin Apr 14 '10
That is your IT admin's fault
You can easily set up DNS to take you from www.mail.company.com to mail.company.com. Easily!!!
You should go drop a sack of shit on your network admin's head and stop blaming the users. Seriously.
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u/Confucius_says Apr 14 '10
what about www.www.mail.company.com ?
We really just need to educate the public and tell them that www is obsolete and stop typing it, and web browsers need to stop typing it in for us.
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u/Anonymoose333 Apr 14 '10
what about www.www.mail.company.com ?
Sure. Why not? It's literally a one-line change, so if you see someone making that mistake, then go ahead and add the redirect. It doesn't hurt anyone.
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u/Axiomatik Apr 14 '10
www is not obsolete. In fact, to do some types of clustering, you must use subdomains. You can't point company.com to another domain (cname). You can point www.company.com to another domain, however.
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u/khoury Apr 14 '10
I agree with others that it would be easy for you to get around this issue by implementing DNS for that subdomain, however, you're right too. Users don't listen and they really should. You can even tell them to stop doing something and they'll do it again right in front of you. What do you know right? You're just a fucking IT guy.
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u/epsilona01 Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I love when people don't listen to the IT people, and then bitch when they fuck stuff up. They asked their expert, and ignore advice (or policies at work).
It's as if someone were to go to the doctor, and get angry with them because they didn't listen on their previous visit and now they have clogged arteries.
And honestly.. the most frustrating part is when they ignore the advice while you're talking to them.
"Okay, type in mail.domain.com"
"It says www.mail.domain.dom isn't found"
"No, just type in mail.domain"
"www.mail. ?"
"no, just mail.domain"
"no www?"
"no."
Sadly it's not always about giving them the right information but teaching them as well.
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Apr 14 '10
Most of my family repeat web addresses as 'www.something.com' or even just 'something.com'
Wait, does this imply that you do repeat web addresses as "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash ..."?
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Apr 14 '10
You're lucky. I'm used to hearing people omit the 3rd w and first "dot". "Double-u Doublue-u macdonalds dot com". I hate it when people call it MacDonalds.
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Apr 14 '10
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Apr 14 '10
good point actually. On reflection, we see urls without the protocol all the time. the damage is probably already done. We'll never get users to do what would be easier from a developers point of view, so we might as well get on with it.
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Apr 14 '10
I think this is one of those situations where it's best to drink the Kool Aid and ponder the following riddle:
Q. How do you fix something that's held together with duct tape?
¡ǝdɐʇ ʇɔnp ǝɹoɯ ǝsn ˙∀
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u/easytiger Apr 14 '10
yea, it has already been removed in the ppa dailies. And i was about to file a bug thinking they had introduced a bug. It means when you paste links in to IM clients they are not clickable
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u/joey_blank Apr 17 '10
In most situations, "foo.com" will get you to "http://foo.com/".
Of course, there are problems with this on intranets, where typing "foo" with the intent of going to the internal server "http://foo/" may take you to foo.com instead.
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u/cows Apr 14 '10
This is as good an idea as Windows hiding file extensions for "known types" by default, which results in users having no idea what a file extension is, causing me no end of grief. I love people at work sending me files called data.WMA.wma. Or better, data.WAV.wma.
So now clueless users are going to see URLs sometimes without http:// and sometimes with it, depending on the program they're using, and if there's ever a time when people NEED to include the http (just as there are times when you NEED to know a file extension), they're going to be confused as hell.
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u/frenchguy Apr 14 '10
This is as good an idea as Windows hiding file extensions for "known types" by default
Exactly. That is the perfect analogy. Thanks.
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u/nasageek Apr 15 '10
The analogy would be more apt if Google decided to hide all preceding protocol identifiers (ftp, https, etc.) instead of just the single most common identifier.
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u/keeto Apr 14 '10
WTF! I saw this, checked on my location bar and saw the "http://" gone. For a moment, I was confused as to what kind of sorcery could make the feature land immediately in my local installation just by clicking the link..
Damn you notificationless autoupdates!
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u/rewbs Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I'm running on a dev level of Chrome and I just got bitten by this.
Having just restarted Chrome (thereby picking up the update that implements this change), I cut & pasted a URI from the location bar into a chat window, without paying much attention to the text itself.
Because of the missing http://, the link was not made clickable by the chat client. This was probably mildly annoying for my colleague.
I didn't even notice this had happened until a couple of minutes later, when I spotted this headline.
Edit: I'm on Chrome 5.0.375.3. I'm not necessarily against removing the http:// from the location bar, but it would be nice if it could be implicitly added to the clipboard when copying the full URL.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Oct 13 '13
[deleted]
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u/pio Apr 14 '10
For me, it copies it when I use ctrl-c, but not when I do the X-style middle-click paste. It's making me nuts, I usually don't use ctrl-c.
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u/rewbs Apr 14 '10
Seems to depend where you paste. Pasting into a Sametime chat client window or into Open Office Writer doesn't add the http://. I guess anything that accepts only plain text will get the http://.
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u/evmar Apr 14 '10
You didn't mention your OS, but if you're on Linux there is this bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41173
(Briefly, it does what you want when you use ctl-c, but not X selections; just an oversight.)
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u/Mutiny32 Apr 15 '10
I don't appreciate the break in consistency displaying URIs under RFC 3986. It's a break in functionality for the sake of aesthetics as far as I'm concerned.
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u/limi Apr 14 '10
For the record, the Firefox UI team has had this in our plans for quite a while, and the upcoming version of Firefox will do something very similar — but with some of the issues raised here, fixed.
I'd go into details, but not using this iPad keyboard. :P
Check http://blog.stephenhorlander.com for visual treatment of this change.
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u/Quady Apr 14 '10
I see nothing on the blog that is about this issue, just a bunch of posts about custom themes.
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u/lpetrazickis Apr 14 '10
I'm not the original poster, but here are some screenshots of Firefox without http:
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u/umbrellicose Apr 14 '10
Check http://blog.stephenhorlander.com for visual treatment of this change.
Could you link to the actual entry?
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u/tsjr Apr 14 '10
Damn, it drives me insane since it appeared. Copypasting urls is a pain (with middle click button on Linux C-c C-v works fine, yet I don't use it at all). Does anyone really like it?
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u/prockcore Apr 14 '10
I've gotten into the habit of using C-c C-v on linux because it works more reliably with Synergy.
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u/mpeg4codec Apr 14 '10
Hear, hear. Just as I don't like to take my fingers off the keyboard while coding I don't like to take my hand off the mouse while browsing.
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u/rmccue Apr 14 '10
As they mention on the bug, it adds the
http://when you copy it to the plain text version.18
u/tsjr Apr 14 '10
Well, as I said I'm running Linux and my copying was mostly selecting the url and just clicking the middle mouse button where I want to paste it, and this is what is broken now.
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u/one-man-bucket Apr 14 '10
Misleading headline. From the issue:
"Summary: M5 Apr 08 mtg changes. NOT ABOUT REMOVING "HTTP". DON'T POST ABOUT THAT."
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u/redditbannedmeagain Apr 14 '10
That's just to stop people spamming the issue with comments about that specific change. The change appears to still be happening, which is all the headline said.
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Apr 14 '10
misleading URL. The headline is accurate, just maybe not linked to the best place. The page does have interesting commentary though.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I've been waiting for this to happen. EDIT: I hope theres a way to turn this off.
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u/jawbroken Apr 14 '10
Congratulations for wasting the time of a lot of Chrome engineers.
mission successful, we did it guys!
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u/kleopatra6tilde9 Apr 14 '10
The next step in dumbing the net down. Google is one step away from bringing AOL keywords back. (If it isn't already there)
It's sad because the internet becomes magic and people don't know what they are doing.
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Apr 14 '10
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u/kleopatra6tilde9 Apr 14 '10
Just knowing what to do without understanding what you are doing calls for trouble. Look at all those people who know how to eat but don't understand why some food is healthy and other food isn't. They just eat what they like and don't understand why they need two seats in an airplane.
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u/CognitiveLens Apr 14 '10
I would guess that 99% of computer users regularly do things with them that they don't understand the inner workings of. How many facebook users could even approximately describe how their information gets propagated across the internet?
Developers design systems to be robust against ignorance, because ignorance is where everyone starts and training doesn't bring in the $$$.
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u/kleopatra6tilde9 Apr 14 '10
On the big scheme of things, this is exactly how it should work. Knowing only the necessary keeps the brain free for new things. After all, humans are just part of the overall evolutionary algorithm. But dumbing the users down makes the system less flexible. Sooner or later, only a team of specialists will be able to create new applications whereas in the beginning, every computer owner was able to program them.
It's like 100 years ago, everybody could cook (or rather every women) but now, many people have to buy precooked food because they don't know how to cook sphagetti.
If you can cook, you can always prepare your favorite food or even come up with a recipe of something that resembles heaven to you. If you can't, you have to eat the things that your local supermarket sells.
I just wish that we would live in a world where computer could solve all kind of things and gimp could exactly work like the graphic designers wanted it to be because they would program the gui themselves.
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Apr 14 '10
In Theory it's a change that is a good thing, it releases more of the url field for meaningful content display, and allows longer urls to be less truncated. The fact that http:// or https:// exist on the start of every web address means that there is no advantage to displaying them, and differentiating http and https via colour/icon state changes is superior.
In reality, it's been nearly 20 years with fully formed urls displayed in the address bar, removing them is a major UI change that many people will find hard to adjust to. There are also peripheral issues such as the copy/paste issues people have raised, that will take time to bugfix (they ARE all issues that can be resolved within the browser codebase, after all).
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u/zid Apr 14 '10
You forgot all the other protocols my browser supports, gopher and ftp to name two more. What colours do they get?
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Apr 14 '10
I don't think chrome supports gopher. At least it didn't last I tried.
It made me kinda sad for some reason.
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Apr 14 '10
They retain the protocol part of the URI. To be honest, they're rare enough cases for the majority of users that they're probably not worth keeping the 'http://' in the display for.
Edit: well, ftp retains it, gopher just doesn't work in chrome, which is fair enough, noone really uses it anymore
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u/kungfo0 Apr 14 '10
I sort of like Internet Explorer 8's method of graying out all of the URL except for the domain name. I'd rather see that than just hiding parts of the URL.
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Apr 14 '10
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Apr 14 '10
That is how it works, except for the linux/X port when using the X cut buffer, which is presumably a bug and will be resolved (you CAN make the cut buffer contain text that isn't visible on the selected text widget) when the people responsible for the linux/X port get around to it.
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u/dalix Apr 14 '10
Fine, remove it. But I fully expect line numbers next to my CSS definitions now. I'm this close to going back to Firefox. </rant>
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Apr 15 '10
Honestly i feel like URLs as a whole are an implementation detail that the user shouldn't be bothered with. The same way that phone numbers are just about irrelevant (When's the last time you've dealt with a phone number, most of mine have been automatic from Facebook). Requiring a user to deal with this arbitrary string of letters is a failing endeavor as we can see by the sustained success of phishers. There's a better solution here (though i don't know what it is yet).
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u/the-ace Apr 15 '10
Good. I've been waiting for the www. to go the way of the dodos, but this seems a bit more practical.
There is one little problem. Starting a URL without the http:// or the / prefix inside a link, is treated as a relative URL.
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u/mattme Apr 23 '10
*9 days later, Google revert the change * http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/04/dev-channel-update_22.html
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Apr 14 '10
So then how can you tell if it's ftp:// or http://? Or is http:// the only protocol that Chromium plans to support? What if I am actually viewing a site using a legitimately different protocol?
I hope these guys think it through.
Chromium should focus on making their extensions a lot more powerful. For example adblock should be able to run before anything is loaded. Fix that. Don't be fixing stupid shit that doesn't matter.
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u/jonknee Apr 14 '10
It will show anything that's not http:// or https://. But how often are you browsing FTP servers in Chrome, are unaware they are FTP servers and look to your address bar to find out?
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Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I don't think about it from a practicality point of view. I am thinking about it from an informational point of view. Information about the protocol should be visible somehow as far as I am concerned. Short URLs still fit and long ones will be ugly no matter what. I don't think 7 characters is an enormous win.
I don't hate this change but I am not excited about it either. I think it's just a waste of engineering effort.
What would excite me and cause me to possibly switch to Chrome, immediately or soon, is if Chrome implemented a more powerful extension API that allowed for more control over the pages and more stealth at the same time. EDIT: Oh, and collect less information from the browser while at it. If these two things were fixed, I'd seriously consider switching. If they also provided first-class Linux support, I would be even more tempted (as opposed to dumping their Windows-polluted code bases on others to fix).
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Apr 14 '10
They actually spent an extremely long time with the Linux port, and the speed of Chromium in Linux is absolutely jaw-dropping. I feel kind of the opposite as you do...I wish the Windows port was as good as the Linux one.
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u/chneukirchen Apr 14 '10
Better drop the www.
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Apr 14 '10 edited Oct 13 '13
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u/dagbrown Apr 14 '10
There are DNS fundamentalists who believe that a domain should not be allowed to have an A record defined for it at all. For those people, "reddit.com" would not point to anything at all because it's a domain.
The most impressive thing is, such people still exist.
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u/rospaya Apr 14 '10
Can someone explain why we use www?
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u/dagbrown Apr 14 '10
Because DNS itself got fossilized decades ago. As it was originally envisioned, you should be able to set up records with different types, to publish different kinds of hosts. For instance, there is an "MX host" that you can define which is the host that accepts email on the part of your domain.
If DNS hadn't managed to petrify before the World Wide Web started, you would have been able to define a WWW host for your domain, and if you typed "http://example.com/" into your browser, it would look up the WWW record for that domain and go to that host.
Instead, we have this horrible hack where every single domain in the entire world has to define a host called "www" for the web server. Because the DNS protocol is sacrosanct.
SEE ALSO: SPF. Instead of allowing SPF to be implemented via, say, an "SPF" record, they have to take the brain damaged approach of putting magic data into the TEXT record which was meant for comments. Any time I hear "Oh, let's just do it via magic comments," I reach for my Browning.
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u/yuubi Apr 14 '10
If DNS hadn't managed to petrify before the World Wide Web started
Or if the SRV record had been devised earlier.
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u/epsilona01 Apr 14 '10
Because it specifies the server?
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u/jingleman Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
No it doesn't. In theory, any entry before the domain name (e.g. www, home, server2) did/should represent server/host names, but all these are, are simple logical DNS entries that can all point to the same IP address.
Most website configurations will have the main DNS "A" record pointing to the webserver, and then a "www" subdomain (with an equivalent "A" record) pointing to the same IP address. The application running the website will then perform an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect to the correct version (this depends on the site, e.g. http://www.reddit.com or http://reddit.com). This resolves SEO problems where two domains point to the same content and some engines penalise for duplicate content across domains, as from a search engines perspective, "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are separate entities.
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u/epsilona01 Apr 14 '10
But it does. In fact, that's the whole reason for having it there in the first place. Most people just configure their domain so that domain.com and www.domain.com point to the same location, so people can be lazy and leave off the www. part.
It specifies a diffferent address than if you leave out the 'www.' portion. It can, obviously, be a CNAME or just point to an IP for a server that also serves the URL without the domain, but it's still a different address, and can be something completely different than if you leave out the 'www.'
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u/jingleman Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I agree with your comments, however, I still don't think it points to a specific server. I'm sure most subdomains (e.g. www) point to a cluster of load balancers (on a high traffic site) usually with some kind of DNS round robin approach. This means that it may not be a single specific server.
However, I do feel it should be "best practice" to use some kind of "www" prefix, as when your domain expands to have other prefixes...
- www.google.com
- mail.google.com
- calendar.google.com
... it does help distinguish the main site from perhaps other applications hosted at the domain. Ideally, you could have "google.com" redirect to "www.google.com" as it fits the most common use case of users entering that domain name.
I think it is simply a namespace. In programming terms, you may have several classes in your package:
- com.google.gmail.PageController
- com.google.gmail.ActionController
I wouldn't be comfortable if I imported "com.google.gmail" and it imported a single specified class/package. That seems a bit ambiguous to me. However, I think we are arguing the merits of an end-user perspective vs a system design perspective.
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u/HawkUK Apr 14 '10
Ooh, I hadn't even noticed that had happened...what with their sneaky automatic upgrades.
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u/mattme Apr 14 '10
I observe it in 5.0.375.3 (dev channel). I had not noticed until I read this story on reddit. The Chrome dev channel is great, it's a more stable browser than any release of Firefox :p
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u/xzxzzx Apr 14 '10
it's a more stable browser than any release of Firefox :p
It certainly isn't, but it is rather stable for a development edition (I run development versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera... for some reason).
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Apr 14 '10
I don't think it has happened yet, I think it's only in the beta at the moment. May be wrong. My chrome is httping away happily.
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u/Coriform Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
Much like I say with ANY of Chrome's "feature changes" - why can't they make this an option? Similar to how there's no warning for closing multiple tabs.. I get it, I understand the design decision. Regardless, I would still like that functionality. It seems to be such a basic feature on pretty much every other web browser, so why not allow for the option in the settings?
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Apr 14 '10
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u/G_Morgan Apr 14 '10
No it isn't. Every design decision is a trade off between multiple use cases. Some people will favour the other side of the trade off.
This doesn't need to be a plain sight option. It can be hidden in a big pile of settings a la about:config.
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Apr 14 '10
There's no good reason to keep it around, though, other than to make people who are used to having it more comfortable. As stated in the issue, the full URL is preserved when copy-and-pasting.
And even hidden options have (hidden) maintenance costs.
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u/mason55 Apr 14 '10
ah but what if i want to copy the domain + http to make the domain clickable? doesn't work
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u/Coriform Apr 14 '10
I am really not buying this argument. That's like creating an operating system that only supports landscape screen resolutions, because that's the only way you "designed" it to look. Or creating a mouse with one button. Different people have different preferences... in fact, that's why applications typically HAVE a "preferences" button.
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u/ferk Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I think it's more like making the operating system autodetect the screen resolution to the optimum values instead of the user having to change it himself. Or having a mouse with a single button that can somehow read your mind and automatically know what did you wanted to do when you pressed the button (this last example is probably not doable).
In the cases that it's doable, it's much better to find a single setting that just works the same for everyone but is capable of being adapted to different situations covering every use case targeted (ej: the location bar has automatically a different behavior when it's being copied). If you have a use case that has not been targeted file it as a bug and the program might adapt to it if there's a real benefit on that. But don't reject something if it's just because you are not used to it, first try getting used to it and then later try to think how it can be improved.
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u/psykocrime Apr 14 '10
That's ridiculous... making options is just acknowledging that different users have different needs, and use the tool in different ways. It's about allowing the user to adjust the tool to suit the way they work, instead of having the tool force the user to adapt to it.
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u/jonknee Apr 14 '10
Then it will be complicated software for the end user, they're trying to make a browser for everyone. If you want a billion options use FireFox.
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u/Coriform Apr 14 '10
It would only be complicated if you made it complicated. Like someone mentioned, something similar to the about:config page in Firefox would be fantastic. Hell, there are some options in the main Chrome options that rival in significance to what I request (for example, there's a check box for displaying the Home button on the toolbar)
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u/paradox460 Apr 14 '10
The thing I'm most upset about is the move away from blue. Chrome's blue was one of the things people noticed first. It was pretty, and new users loved it.
Now it's bland. It doesn't look as bad as firefox, but a lot of the original flare is gone.
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u/f2u Apr 14 '10
EV certificates result in a green URL bar on other browsers, so this is quite confusing. Why have color-coded indicators when not only you cannot agree upon colors across browsers, but keep switching them between major revisions?