

The importance of “http://” - bensummers
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/3962

======
mansr
This reminds me of what happened when Microsoft decided to trim known suffixes
off displayed filenames. Has everybody forgotten the hot-babe.jpg.exe viruses?
With unicode allowed in domain names, it's only a matter of time before
someone registers http：／／gmail.com.

~~~
nhebb
They still do that. One of the first things I do on a new Windows system is to
turn that "feature" off.

~~~
pavlov
To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.

~~~
uriel
And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on
OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the
configuration options.

~~~
edd
Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Show all filename extensions

------
nudge
Jeez. I really don't get the fuss about this. 99% of web users probably won't
even notice, except they might be pleased with the removal of the
incomprehensible (and, for years now, unnecessary for input) code in front of
the part of the website address they recognise and understand.

And for everybody else, what exactly is the problem? Copy/paste? I'm sure that
can be fixed, even if it means the user setting "show <http://> in my address
bar" as a preference.

I read a lot on this and other websites about opinionated design. This is one
of those things. The chrome team think this is a good idea. Some people
disagree. As anyone who has ever run any kind of open source project can tell
you, you can't just react to objections with "Okay then let's switch it back".
At some point you have to actually make your own decision, weighing up the
benefits against the costs, taking into account the number of people
experiencing each.

In this case, it seems like a massive improvement for simplicity for most web
users, and a trivial, surely quite easily fixed bug for an unknown percentage
of the small percentage of users who would ever need or want the '<http://>
there.

Just my opinion. I would be interested to hear what other people think.

~~~
ay
\- it makes the system second-guess in more places. Means more complexity -
understandingly some bugs to fix (tinyurl.com/http-strip)

\- the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just
above). And will wonder why they are not linkable.

Now either the site owners have to jump through the hoops to replicate the
second-guessing logic to their sites, or everyone who views the URL, will have
to copy/paste manually.

Another couple of questions I will start asking as a user: why does the ftp://
thing pops up in front of the URL if I use it ? And, what is <https://> and
why is it suddenly there when I only want to go to gmail.com ?

This change noticeably increases the number of places which violate the
principle of least surprise. But maybe I am a corner-case :-)

EDIT:

And, if we look at the whole "address bar" under the same UI angle - the path
and the query string is equally a useless technobabble for anyone non-geek.
So, I think we would go further and just show the host name, while we are at
it.

~~~
ugh
_\- the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did
just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable._

What?! I know of no one who ever, ever, ever said <http://> when mentioning a
URL. I certainly don’t do that.

~~~
ay

      #define mention(url) type_or_paste_into_facebook(url)
    

Sorry that my wording was unclear. "referencing in writing elsewhere" might
have been a better one.

~~~
krainboltgreene
People have been using "lol, hey, go to www.google.com" for years without
problems.

------
jwr
I find it mindboggling that instead of removing the silly and superfluous
"www." they are trying to remove the meaningful and important "<http://>.

It doesn't solve any actual problem and creates a slew of new ones.

~~~
tzs
"www" is only superfluous at some sites, and there is no way they can tell
which. Even doing a name lookup on both and checking if the IP is the same is
not sufficient, because they could be different virtual hosts on the same IP.

------
ErrantX
In all honesty I have only just noticed that the machine I am working on has
this feature.

I see the draw backs but the fact I haven't noticed for about 48 hours or more
is, well, telling IMO.

~~~
nudge
Agreed. People seem to be upset mainly because of what they imagine certain
users will do, rather than what they have actually seen happen.

------
aegnor
Using the latest daily build of chromium I couldn't reproduce a single one of
the "issues" that the post presented.

It seems they've all been fixed before he wrote the post.

------
rubyrescue
try it - if you copy from the bar it adds <http://> into the buffer

~~~
moe
I did and it _doesn't_. On OSX. When pasting into adium.

It seems to work when pasting into a terminal. Haven't tried other apps, yet.

And yes, that's a big problem. I don't want to double-check my urls when
pasting them into various messengers, skype or whatever. Here's a tip google:
If you can't implement it 200% reliable then don't f-ck with something as
essential as URL copy/paste. People will not be amused at all.

~~~
ay
Check if your behaviour matches one of these:

code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?q=label:HTTPStripping

and file a new one if not.

EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "<http://> since:

* after looking at it in the omnibox, I decide I like it better this way indeed, and 6 less keystrokes. The others will have to copypaste or the webapp writers will have to figure a way to highlight it :-)

* the copypaste is not working in the linux case either, but that's one of the logged bugs.

It's really the first point that I am trying to say is the biggest impact that
this change will have. "If it works in Chrome, it has to work everywhere".

~~~
arantius
> EDIT: I am intentionally not including the "<http://> since:

And I am intentionally not clicking the link because ... it's not a link. I
have a greasemonkey script that automatically turns plain text URLs into
clickable links. But the text in your post is not a URL. It's a domain and a
path, but with no scheme it is not a URL.

------
krainboltgreene
Removing choice from users _is_ bad...

But how many average users do you know actively pick what protocol to use?
None of them. For them, HTTP is it.

Only geeks use FTP anymore.

