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Comment by wst_ | Hacker News Reader

How about older people? Can your parents explain the difference? Mine can't and I can assure you most of them are the same.

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Try this:

Grandma: I'm typing domain.com into my browse on [random device] and it doesn't work.

Nerd grandchild: well that's because it doesn't exist.

Grandma: But it works on my other computer.

Nerd grandchild: that's because the browser tries lots of domains like www.domain, domain.org and so on when you enter domain.

Grandma: yes, I noticed that. When I enter www.domain.com, it automatically corrects it to domain.com. So that's must be the right one, surely?

Nerd grandchild: Nope. domain.com is the correct domain. It's just trying not to confuse you.

Grandma: ?

Good point - but even my mum (65 and not very good with phones or computers) will just bash the bare domain into her browser.If it's got "www." she'll use that, if not she won't. She still knows it's a web thing, the www. for her and everybody else is superfluous.

Things change. We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. The people who can't deal with this are vanishingly small, and those that can't are likely not your target market; or they're the sort that'll just consider Facebook to be the web.

I'm not disagreeing with your point btw that some people can't deal with this - all I disagree is the extent.

> We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs.

24 from the RFC, 26 from the discussion that led to it, per Wikipedia.

Good point. I was on Janet / ARPANet before the web. Point conceded!

I'd bet good money this change was put in by people younger than the web.

That may be true, and while I wholeheartedly disagree with this change, those that are younger than the web are the next Shepard's of the web.

We're going to see more and more changes that the "old folks of the internet" are going to hate. Some, or even many, of these changes will actually be good changes. We shouldn't prejudice on age.

Again, to be clear, I think this particular change is horribly broken.

Older people care more about consistency than "usability". They can successfully complete long tasks, maybe with several retries but they can, but if they are consistent. Input a long text somewhere, dial 15-20 digit phone number etc. But they can't usually deal with unpredictable situations, where computer will "intelligently" help them, fill parts of the input, when same action is different on different devices, when they need to know how system will behave in advance.

PS: consider how you would guide an older person over the phone when he/she is accessing Citibank website (for which www.citibank is different website), with Chrome will "intelligently" hide essential part of the address.

Agree to that - my experience exactly. Very recent example. My father's using Skype to talk with family. They refreshed UI, he got new version installed and that was it. I've had to answer multiple questions what does this and that button do. "The same dad, it just looks a little bit different." What I got as an answer was "It's placed somewhere else. It is so confusing. Couldn't they just left everything were it's always been..." Thankfully I have remote access to his desktop so I can guide him around in situations like this.

And I am quite sure removing 'www' on the address bar's domains is as confusing.

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