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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Most browsers treat one word not as a domain but as a search key. This was an issue when companies started getting their own TLDs. Could you just type "amazon" or "microsoft", which are TLDs, and go there without being diverted to a search engine? The answer is no. Even if you put a dot after the domain name.

DNS lookup and web browser domain lookup are not quite the same. This is the price of a unified input bar.

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> This is the price of a unified input bar.

I never saw what was wrong with having a URL and a search box in the same bar. It was fine, and I knew that whatever I typed into the URL bar would be treated as a URL.

Fast forward a few years, and URLs I type into the bar are not treated as URLs (internal HTTP URLs get rewritten to HTTPS when a server is restarting).

Mobile Safari likes to do this to me w/ machines on my tailnet. Whether dropping "foo:8080" in the address bar takes me to the webserver or to Google is random and I swear there is no pattern

in my experience you have to explicitly add the https:// prefix to get it to consistently load the address

Drop a slash at the end, it tends to turn it into an actual NS lookup not a search.

...add .local and pray it works this time.

A forward slash at the end usually does the trick for me.

homeserver -> Google

homeserver/ -> http://homeserver/

Putting a slash '/' at the end consistently gets you there, at least in Chromium-based browsers. We use this a lot at work (via DNS search suffixes, not private TLDs).

The "correct" way would be to add a dot at the end

At least in chrome the final period doesn't seem skip search, so I guess you want tld./ (or foo/ if you want to use your search domain)

Why would that be more correct? A trailing dot indicates that a domain is fully-qualified, but that's not the issue here. The browser is trying to decide whether your query is a search string or a URL.

Also, a trailing dot would indicate the opposite of what we want - we're using single-label domains that only work if we can rely on search suffixes to qualify them.

At a previous company, our intrasite was a bare custom domain, and the most reliable way to get there was to add a / at the end. This is likely browser dependent though

You can change that in Firefox by setting keywords.enable to False. This is in fact the first thing I change on the browser.

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