In a very surprising move, Google just touched what no one dared to touch before, what actually appears in the address bar.

Well, actually Microsoft did decide to touch it once, by graying out everything that isn’t part of the domain in the address bar when you’re not typing and your mouse isn’t on the address bar. Google copied them with Chrome but botched the whole goal, removing the un-graying action when you’re actually typing something and leaving the whole domain name including the sub-domain in full black, which makes the point of doing such a thing pretty worthless, since it’s technically supposed to help people see when they are on phishing web sites.

For example, a fake PayPal web site would look like this in both scenarios:

I thus think it’s very clear for the end user of IE 8 that they’re not on paypal.com but on fake.com, however the distinction isn’t so clear in Google Chrome. Note that Firefox, Opera and Safari provide absolutely no such clues to inform users on the validity of a web site. As a reader of this blog, you might think that having highlighting is unnecessary and that even without it anyone can tell if it’s a fake address, but you’d be surprised at how frequent Internet users get fooled quite easy, even on IE 8. Actually, there’s a strong percentage of users who don’t even know what a sub-domain is.

But in Google’s case, I tend to believe they highlight the address that way to favor quick identification instead of doing it for security purposes. Considering Google’s practical aim for speed, efficiency, and, well, search, it’d make a lot of sense for them to think that way, especially given the efforts they have gone through to simplify the address bar. Google is the first to combine the search and the address bar by default, and Chrome is also unique in being the first browser to prioritize on direct results (ex: engadget.com) while typing in the address bar instead of giving the most recent history item (ex: www.engadget.com/2010/04/13/editorial-engadget-on-microsoft-kin/).

What Google Did

Starting with Chromium 5.0.377.0 (I think, but I’ve noticed it since I installed this release, jumps from 370 so it’s in-between), Google decided that the famous but confusing http://www. was no longer. Instead, it’s now stripped from the address bar on whatever web site you go to.

So, what’s up with that and why is it so important? Keep reading to find out.

History of the “www”

WWW, or World Wide Web, is well, the Internet as we know it today. Back then, FTP and NNTP protocols used prefixes like ftp:// and nntp:// in order to define what they were. They still do today, but the practice of using such prefixes to define the services was transcended into the WWW.

However, because web sites weren’t transfered over the www protocol but on the http protocol, which they still are today, it was impossible to prefix a web site with www://. It had to be http://, because of its underlying protocol. The Internet web sites however, came to be known as a whole as the World Wide Web, or WWW, and not HTTP. And so, in order to market web sites as being web sites, the generic www sub-domain was prefixed to practically every web site in existence.

When web sites were just a new thing, the practice of prefixing addresses with www was meaningful. Anything preceded by www on a business card for instance automatically referred to a web site.

They could have wrote http, but web browsers were quick to implement automatic http:// input before it even the web even became mainstream. Given that the HTTP protocol had to be written http://, www was much more elegant, hence its popularity in the mainstream market.

www is actually a sub-domain

But in reality, www is actually a sub-domain. Contrary to popular belief, there is no real difference between www, ww2, www2, blablabla and somethingelse. If any of these precede a web site, they’re a sub-domain. Some people are so used to www they think they have to put it in front of actual sub-domains, resulting in ugliness like www.sub-domain.domain.com. Yes, this is actually a dual sub-domain, and believe it or not, but famous web sites like deviantART implement it to avoid cases where users would type www.user.deviantart.com and come up with an error instead of the user page.

However, a sub-domain is distinct from its domain, so http://www.pacoup.com and http://pacoup.com actually don’t necessarily point to the same web site. Usually though, practice has been that http:// and http://www. point to the same web site, with one often redirecting the user to the correct sub-domain or domain, which is the case of most dynamic web sites that require a consistent web domain in order to function properly, this blog not being an exception.

In fact, you can test it yourself. Simply type www.pacoup.com and press enter, and you’ll find that you’ve been redirect to pacoup.com without the www. In most cases where a web site works on both domains, it’ll be a static web site.

Arising problems because of uneducated admins

In the old days of the web, www became so well-known that a significant amount of web sites didn’t work at all without www before the address. In fact, the host didn’t even support accessing the domain without the www sub-domain, which led to the false belief that web addresses must be preceded by a www. Heck, the ability to access a web site with or without the preceding www even became a feature on some low-tech-consumer-targeting hosts such as 1and1 and still is today.

Unfortunately, major web sites like practically all the Government of Canada web sites and myriad other small web sites don’t work without the www. Even the USA’s CIA web site doesn’t work without it because its SSL certificate is attached to www.cia.gov and cia.gov.

Fortunately, in the case of Google Chrome, it redirects you to a Google Search page proposing the correct address. Baldy setup SSL web sites like cia.gov however throw you a very pretty dangerous web site warning.

To www or to not www?

I’m very much in line with what Google thinks, www should go. The prefix www is inherently wrong so you should not use it. It’s not questionable, it’s just the way it’s made. Referring to your main web site via a sub-domain is just plain stupid, even though the industry’s been doing it for ages.

For the sakes of compatibility, you should include a redirecting www sub-domain for the uneducated masses out there, but you should never default your web site to www. Don’t redirect users from http:// to http://www., redirect them from http://www. to http://. That’s the way it’s meant to be, and in fact, the first web site to ever exist didn’t use any www prefix (although it was a sub-domain, namely nxoc01.cern.ch).

Is there confusion because you didn’t include the www? No, frankly, people today recognize .com, .net, .org, or .anything for that matter. Advertisers discovered it was more efficient to forgo a prefix before their company name. www.microsoft.com/silverlight is not as easy on the eyes as microsoft.com/silverlight, and the later provides the added benefit of providing the reader with the name of the company first instead of a generic “www” marking.

How Chrome handles it

In all actuality, Google did not remove the entire www sequence of web sites, they just removed the protocol sequence. In fact, it would be suicide to remove any www, because let’s not forget it’s a sub-domain. Such a rule would also be bound to remove regular sub-domains, which are very important.

But on web sites where Chrome detects it makes sense, such as www.engadget.com or www.techcrunch.com, the www is also stripped out. I don’t know how this is figured out, but it looks like it relies on a few tips, such as if the web site is powered by WordPress, etc.

Chrome is also smart in that it only hides the http sequence. Copying any address from the bar will copy the complete, http sequence included, address.

Simplicity Rules

In other words, Google has decided to push the simplicity of the web even further by getting rid of the www. Google Search still runs on the www, but I’m guessing changing this one is a bit more complicated considering the size of it. If this Chrome thing sticks though, I think it’s easy to see a very close future where Google.com comes without the www.

Advice for Web Masters

1. Redirect www to the raw, http:// address.
2. Never refer to your web site by including the word “www”
3. Keep a www sub-domain for compatibility reasons
4. Teach your friends and family to type addresses without the http or www sequence
5. Contact the owners of web sites who don’t provide www-less access with a polite advice email/letter
6. Twit a thank you to web sites like arstechnica.com that use the correct web address syntax