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Comment by no_gravity | Hacker News Reader

Let's take a look what the top sites according to Alexa do:

https://www.alexa.com/topsites

    Google: www
    Youtube: www
    Facebook: www
    Baidu: www
    Wikipedia: www

I see a trend here...

Would be interesting to go through the whole list and get a broader statistic.

Let's look at some of the newer/hipper sites on the list:

    Reddit: www
    Instagram: www
    Netflix: www
    Twitch: www
    Spotify: www

So all 10 out of 10 major sites I visited redirected me from the non-www to the www version.

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The list of sites you're referring to are mostly older sites, such that they come from an era on the Web when www was overwhelmingly the status quo. What would be more interesting is for someone to compile a top 30 or such list of new & popular sites from the last five years.

Your list in years old:

Netflix 21; Google 20; Baidu 18; Wikipedia 17; Facebook 14; Reddit: 13; YouTube 13; Spotify 12.

Only Twitch and Instagram are less than a decade old (barely).

Netflix isn't new or hip, they have all-gray hair and are at heightened risk of breaking a hip in Web age terms.

Some popular sites without www:

Twitter, DuckDuckGo, Stripe, Imgur, TechCrunch, Bandcamp, Medium, Stackoverflow, Square, Github, OfferUp, Poshmark, Giphy, Lifehacker, Gfycat, 22 Words, Go.com, Discord, 24/7 Sports, Nextdoor, Mental Floss, Vimeo, thechive, Comicbook.com, Patch, Mega.nz, Food52, HBO Go, Phys.org, Gizmodo, Pitchfork, Padlet, Definition.org, Shmoop

What the heck does age have to do with anything? Do you think that Google and Facebook don't know how to redirect from www to the root domain because they're too old to figure it out or something?

This is just further shows how it's a weird cultural issue for some people.

> What the heck does age have to do with anything?

A lot.

If your site is 15 or 20 years old, you're from an era where consumers universally expected www to preface a domain. 20 years ago consumer ignorance was extremely high as it pertained to how the Web worked and how addresses worked, any variations from what was normal would be a poor choice. It was also technically more annoying 20 years ago to try to get by without www, companies like Cloudflare have helped make that far more trivial as an issue. Once you've become very successful such that tens or hundreds of millions of people are using your service and you've firmly established your address (eg as www.facebook.com), the downside risk is greater than the upside potential to bother switching from www to non-www at that point. If you're Facebook and you've acquired a sweet 2 billion person social monopoly, there's zero potential value in messing with switching from www.fb.com to fb.com.

Further, if you've built up an elaborate service over many years using www and attaching cookies and subdomains to countless services, there can be a plethora of super annoying problems (and or very serious security risks) to deal with in switching to non-www for your core. So once again, for someone like Facebook or Google, the value proposition to switching a gigantic service over, is more of a nightmare. If you're just starting out with none of that legacy, such things are not a problem, you build from the ground up for non-www.

If you're Twitter, Imgur, Github or Stripe and you want the identity benefit of having no www in the front - it produces a better url for advertising, a shorter url for function (valuable historically for eg Twitter and Imgur), and stronger visual branding (less cruft around your name) - then you avoid www from the early days.

More recent companies that redirect from the root to www: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, WeWork, SpaceX, DiDi, Coinbase, Blue Apron, Stitch Fix, The Information, Flexport.

Gitlab goes one better and redirects the root domain to about.gitlab.com.

How about Bird scooters, founded 2017? Yup, redirects to www.

Lets look at some recent Ycombinator grads [1]. It's about half and half whether they redirect to www.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/the-top-10-startups-from-y...

Whatever factor you think age plays in the www subdomain decision, it doesn't seem to be reflected by real companies.

Twitter is a notable exception: www.twitter.com redirects to non-www.

Wikipedia’s `www` version is just a page asking you which language you want: en.wikipedia.org, fr.wikipedia.org, etc.

And how many subdomains does each of those examples have?

What is your point? Those subdomains are probably almost all applications or APIs and not websites.

At least Google has plenty of subdomains that are websites. mail.google.com, sites.google.com, drive.google.com, images.google.com, maps.google.com...

Google: a lot, most of their services has one. However, I believe they use an OAuth (-ish) service rather than session IDs to manage authentication, so cookies aren't really an issue.

YouTube: no major subdomains as far as I know. Facebook: aside from developer resources (which require you to log on with Facebook), none really.

Baidu: not familiar with it, so no idea.

Wikipedia: one for every language. Furthermore, the Wikipedia of each language seems to be completely separate, both in content and accounts.

Reddit: a lot. Aside from the obvious api.reddit.com, users may use <whatever>.reddit.com and the subreddit's CSS may use this info to change the looks of the subreddit.

Instagram: no idea, but I believe the main interface is simply on instagram.com.

Netflix: just netflix.com.

Twitch: as far as I know just the main domain, no subdomains.

Spotify: a few services, like open.spotify.com and play.spotify.com, but they all require you log on separately.

It's pretty mixed, with some websites having a lot of subdomains, but not all of them requiring or using shared cookies.

> YouTube: no major subdomains as far as I know.

YouTube has:

- gaming

- tv

- music

- kids

- artists

Maybe more, but those are the ones linked on YouTube proper.

ycombinator.com also redirects to www.ycombinator.com even though that host doesn't have any content.

I wonder how much that has to do with Chrome and Firefox (and probably other browsers?) prepending www (and https).

edit: I guess both of mine have some plugin doing this?

In the case of Google, not at all:

    $ curl -v https://google.com
    [...]
    < HTTP/2 301
    < location: https://www.google.com/

Just an FYI: in this case you might want to use `curl -i` which will display just headers + body (switch `-v` displays lots of other information too).

    $ curl -i https://google.com
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: https://www.google.com/
    ...

EDIT: interesting that it responds with HTTP/2 in your case and HTTP/1.1 in mine, would need to look up why the responses are different.

Not at all. A browser would never do this. It would break a lot of sites!

Actually, Firefox does prepend the www subdomain but only if it fails to resolve a domain. When I mistype a website (exmaple.com) I often end up at www.exmaple.com if I don't interrupt Firefox.

Chrome is moving towards the opposite though, hiding the www subdomain in the browser bar.

That wouldn't work.

If I served my site through the apex domain, I'd redirect www to the apex — standard practice. With that in mind, if a browser kept forcing me to go to www when it hit the apex, and my site kept forcing the apex when it saw a hit to the www, you'd have an endless loop and the user would never be able to see the site.

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