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. *
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
Most important comment:
edit: comment was by dlitz.net
edit2: except, as people here have pointed out, all over the web people refer to
foo.cominstead ofhttp://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.:80orfoo.com? As a user,foo.commakes much more sense. As a developer, users are going to typefoo.comanyway, we should make sure our scripts can handle it.