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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

Is this really a big deal? Don't many websites either redirect the www to the non-www, or the other way around?

It's about the principle. www is a valid subdomain.

Browsers are supposed to be as unopinionated as possible since they are browsers, not mediators, and their job is to implement the standards of the web.

I didn't realize that the standards of the web specified anything about how an address bar should be displayed (or, for that matter, that it specified anything about an address bar even existing).

> This document describes the syntax and semantics for a compact string representation for a resource available via the Internet. These strings are called "Uniform Resource Locators" (URLs).

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

IE did this years ago too, as I recall. I don't know if Edge still does.

Safari also won't show "www" until you click on the location bar, but it'll show once you click.

Safari doesn't show you the url at all until you click either; so the URL bar is just a domain indicator -- in that case, it seems less objectionable that it doesn't show the FQDN, but instead something different -- copying the url from a screenshot was bound for disappointment anyway.

Your opinion that browsers should be unopinionated is not an opinion shared by browsers.

To give some examples of this:

* Chrome encourages you to sign in to the browser with a Google account.

* Firefox's new tab page shows stories and articles from Pocket.

* The news feed shown by default in Edge provides stories from MSN.

It's still there though. You just have to click on the address bar and it appears (along with the scheme). This is not an issue.

You want your browser to show unlimited popup windows too?

This is a fair point. A possible counterpoint is that one can draw a line at malware. A fairly strong argument can be made that controlling popups is an exceptional security measure that is the only way, or the most effective way, to control the spread of objectively dangerous software. It is also a matter of UI - popups could appear faster than a human could control them, so it makes sense to make popups opt-in (which they are).

No similar argument can be made about disabling "www." It is purely an opinionated decision amounting to "you don't need www" - assuming it's not a bug, of course.

No, but I want my browser to notify me that its blocking popups rather than just hiding them from me entirely and assuming I never wanted to see them anyway.

> their job is to implement the standards of the web.

Is there a standard saying how the URL should be displayed in the toolbar?

Verbatim 1.0

My site, although one can argue it is a poorly configured (although it is intentionally configured this way), is a great example of why this is problematic.

https://www.aishitei.ru vs https://aishitei.ru vs https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru

I never set up a www cname, but now unless you're paying attention (or actually reading error messages) you might not notice that the reason it failed is because you're not at the domain but on the `www` subdomain. The URL bar doesn't convey this information until you click it and then it shows the full URL.

It's really minor but I also don't see a good reason to do this. All the sites hosted by the company I work for are hosted on `www.` with the intention that it "looks more professional".

Many is not all. Quite a few don't work with/without www. But I'm sure google is aware and they have some fallback or something.

Is it really a big deal if customers shoplift? Many are still paying.

Is it really a big deal if you serve the wrong content 1% of the time?

It's not just www: now m.foo.com and www.foo.com look identical, for example.

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