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Comment by glenneroo | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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.

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