- Do they really need to see* http:// or https:// if immediately to the left is the icon which indicates secure/insecure (which is more than just "protocol is https or not")?
- Do they really care to see* if they are at www.site.com or m.site.com or site.com or do they just want to know they are at site.com which they expect to be as they make their purchase or log in?
* noting that bookmarking, copying, or editing the URL operate on the full URL and this is just a visual change otherwise
And voila now the leftmost (first) text they read is not a bunch of jargon it's the thing people look at the URL for the most.
That you couldn't think of any reason tells me you didn't try not that you disagreed with the reasons and had an actual lesson to share about why. Again: "it changed, change bad" people impossible to distinguish from "it changed, actually bad".
Maybe dropping the protocol definition in the URL is debatable, as probably 99.99% of the time in Chrome a user is going to be either http or https, but dropping a part of the hostname is unacceptable in my book.
Would dropping .com be acceptable? All a user wants to see is that they went to Google, to an average user the .com could be seen as redundant clutter as well. Might as well have the address bar show "google" or "cnn" or "facebook" in it, as clearly that's what a user cares about.
You can't really get rid of the TLD without breaking the security model of the web (e.g. a lock icon and google.com is different than a lock icon and google.gtld). Would it be nice to refactor that? Probably. Is it reasonably possible at this point? No.
As you said www.example.com being functionally different from example.com was already a broken workflow, users weren't differentiating it. Continuing to display something users haven't understood for 20 years was not considered a strong enough reason to simplify the URL display now in a way that causes the same errors users were commonly making anyways.
I care what I need.
A standard user was probably fine with something like AOL keywords.
You mean the strawman repeatedly trotted out by people defending shitty changes as justifications for why their shitty change is necessary? Ever wonder why so many things suck nowadays?
Can "the larger group" be used as an excuse for a bad change? Sure! But so far the only reason mentioned as to WHY this change is bad is "www.site.com and site.com could technically be different sites" and I'm not sure how that is supposed to be clear regardless if www shows post load or not or how that's supposed to outweigh the advantages.
