
Google Removes http:// from Chrome - ckcin
http://www.osnews.com/story/23171/Google_Removes_http_from_Chrome
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benofsky
Considering how much is abstracted from the user these days, I've always
wondered why something as technical and meaningless to the average user like
"<http://> hasn't been removed before. Good move I say.

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jwr
What would you say about "www.", then? Shouldn't that be removed as
meaningless, as opposed to the protocol prefix which a) identifies something
as a URL, b) makes it detectable and parseable?

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jheriko
Not really www.foo.com is distinct from foo.com. <http://> is pretty redundant
- you usually only want to specify the protocol if its not http.

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Zev
I doubt that the "average" person would realize that foo.com is different from
www.foo.com — or that they could even be different.

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snprbob86
But they would probably see abc.foo.com as different from xyz.foo.com

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Zev
The _www._ prefix is a special case for people; it literally means "its the
_w_ orld _w_ ide _w_ eb" or "its the internet" to them. Technically, the
subdomain is irrelevant. But, most people don't know this. They don't know how
the internet works and (I'd suspect that this is true in more cases than you
might think), think that www. is needed to get to whatever site they want to
visit.

Of course, this is all assuming that they even type the address in, rather
then searching.

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Qz
I generally just type in the name of the site that I want:

'amazon' for www.amazon.com

Firefox is generally smart enough to take me to where I want to go. The only
issue is when some hack site games it's way to the top of a search result for
something else, but I've only run into that a few times.

Which is itself an issue -- since many browsers are now turning the 'address
bar' into a combo search+address bar, novice users may not even realize what
the difference is (or was).

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chaosmachine
There's a lot of comments about this over here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274591>

~~~
stanleydrew
also here: <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467>

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chime
I like not seeing the http. But I hate that now when you copy-paste, it
doesn't do plain-text anymore. When you paste the url in email, it shows a
hyperlink to example.com/page while linking to <http://example.com/page>. I
would love it if onfocus event for the address-bar shows the http and selects
the full address and copy-paste just copies the plain-text url.

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enomar
I hate rich text copy/paste. I probably only want to copy formatting 5% of the
time. Do any operating systems provide ways to configure how copy/paste works?

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Timothee
It's not exactly "configuration" but Mac OS apps usually have "Paste" and
"Paste and Match Style". The latter being basically a plain text paste with
the current app figuring the rest. (that's what it feels like at least)

However, I have seen a few times where it doesn't really work as expected. Not
sure why.

And I also dislike rich text copy/paste. One example that comes up often for
me is that I copy the link to a comment on HN and paste it to Gmail, and it
just shows up as "link". Stupid.

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DrSprout
> Since 99.999% of the people only ever encounter <http://>, ftp://, and
> <https://> (did I forget any?), why not create a standard set of easy-to-
> understand icons to replace them, in cooperation with other browser makers?

For me at least it's a lot harder to memorize the meaning of a 16x16 pixel
image than a four-character string.

Also, we have exactly the same problem that Google's having with this, which
is that it's difficult to copy/paste, to speak nothing of entering in a url
you have written down.

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mapleoin
how do you copy/paste a 16x16 pixel image + half of the URL?

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lallysingh
and how do you tell when to copy it? If I wanted to avoid the load-balanced
subdomain in a url:

www35.company.com/bar/foo.aspx

and just copied: company.com/bar/foo.aspx

Would the <http://> come over? how about if I just copied "bar/foo.aspx" ?

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peregrine
Nope. The <http://> only comes when its all selected.

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GHFigs
Good move, overall. Every browser I know of automatically inserts the
<http://> and has for some time now. Removing the visual component of this
just completes the abstraction that's already there.

The author suggests replacing the string of text with an icon, like RSS. But
the RSS icon quickly went from "standard" to "indecipherable clusterfuck" in
practice. <http://images.google.com/images?q=rss%20icons>

~~~
joeyh
The "<http://> has been replaced by an icon. I suspect it's supposed to be a
small planet earth icon, but the color choice makes it look like the moon, and
the continent placement makes it look like a squinty smiley face when viewed
from a few feet away.

Icons.. feh.

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fiaz
I can see the obscuring of <http://> being useful way back in 1995, but in
2010, it seems kind of a moot point given how ubiquitous the act of web
browsing is.

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evanrmurphy
Wouldn't it be more useful now that web browsing is so ubiquitous?

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gloob
To be entirely honest, I can't see how it would be useful either in 1995 or
now. A person either cares about URLs or they don't. In the first case, the
URL should be displayed properly; in the second, they won't have a damn clue
what all that funny text in the box at the top of the screen is anyway, so you
may as well show it properly.

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truebosko
Just noticed this on my daily build. I actually kind of like it. Copy/paste
works just fine on Ubuntu Karmic.

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qjz
The scheme is an essential part of the URL. Copying an URL from a browser's
location bar used to be a reliable way of sharing links, but this change
introduces a greater potential for errors (there's no reason to assume an
https resource is available via http, for example).

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Qz
Copy-pasting includes the scheme (mostly, there's a couple bugs at the
moment). Better to read up on the issue before commenting about how it's
supposedly broken.

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qjz
I didn't say it was broken, but that the change increases the possibility of
errors. Look at the other links provided in this thread to see why this is so.
I stand by my statement, which I made after reading up on the issue.

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Qz
Editing your post and claiming you never said the original comment is pretty
shady.

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epi0Bauqu
It's been removed from search engine URL lines for a while.

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joeyh
I've already been bitten from this change a half-dozen times. Every time I
want to share with someone an url I have open in chromium now, I have to
manually type "<http://>.

Hopefully they will eventually fix it so copying from the location bar will
include the full url. (Complicated of course by the fact that a user may only
copy part of the url, leaving off eg "?foo")

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stevejohnson
I was under the impression that copying from the location bar was supposed to
include the <http://>. If it doesn't, that is a pretty strange oversight.

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Qz
It generally does, although there are a few issue with copying partial text
out of the bar, e.g:

[news.ycombinator.com]/somejunk

Copying the bracketed portion should include the <http://> but some situation
were causing it not to be copied, etc.

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swombat
Since the OS X pasteboard is clever enough to add <http://> back in when
copying the url from the location bar, this actually works pretty well on my
Mac. I like it too.

I can see how it'd be intensely frustrating if the pasteboard doesn't work,
though.

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ashleyw
The addition of '<http://> is made by Chrome itself, not OSX.

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swombat
Understood, but I hear that that doesn't work on, say, Linux. I don't know
who's to blame, nor do I care.

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papachito
Yeah, except it works fine on Linux. Nothing to do you with your beloved OSX.

~~~
ay
I just updated the 41609 with one more way of how it does not work on Linux.

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morbandit
When you click in the address bar it should return the <http://> (ala Win7's
explorer bar) - SOLVED!

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gorm
Good move, but they need a new way of showing https or a broken https site.

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tdonia
They do, in either red or blue depending on the SSL state.

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kqueue
The author had to pick on Apple..

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TotlolRon
What happens on Copy/Paste?

google.com <http://google.com>

are not the same in the context of the web.

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nudge
The full url with <http://> is added to the clipboard when you copy.

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marcusbooster
Only if you copy the entire link. If you try and extract a subsection like a
directory, by either dragging across, or by shift unselect, it will not copy
the '<http://>.

A fringe case? Maybe, but I've already run into this pain a few times jumping
back and forth from chrome to emacs.

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nudge
Have you submitted it as a bug? It's the dev track people! Why are you
expecting it to be perfect already?

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_ivan
Monopoly

