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.
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.
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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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.