14 DAY TRIAL // Google has already removed the “www” tag from the address bar in Chrome browser for a more simplified approach, and now Mozilla is planning a similar change in an upcoming Firefox update.
Beginning with Firefox version 75, Mozilla will no longer display the “www” and “https” parts of the URLs when displaying suggestions as users type new page addresses.
It goes without saying that this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, despite the fact that the idea overall is to streamline the experience, especially because these are websites that already exist in the history or the bookmarks library.
Fortunately, however, it’s possible to disable this behavior, albeit what you need to know is that this feature could very well be removed at some point in the future if Mozilla decides so. So right now, you can do this in the Nightly build of Firefox, but if Mozilla decides otherwise, the option could be pulled when the change makes it to the stable version of the browser.
First and foremost, make sure that you’re running the latest Nightly build – at the time of writing, this is 75.0a1 (2020-03-02), so anything newer than this should work too.
Then, you need to access the experimental flags screen to disable the new behavior. To do this, in the address bar of Firefox, type the following command:
about:config
browser.urlbar.trimURLs
Of course, you can always revert the flag to the original settings at any point by following the aforementioned instructions and toggling it to true.
Google originally removed the www part from the URL in the second half of 2018, explaining that while many people consider such information rather familiar, it’s not something that concerns most people anyway.
“The subdomains reappear when editing the URL so people type the correct one. They disappear in the steady-state display case because this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases.
I think this is an OK tradeoff even in the rare case when www.foo.com is not actually the same as foo.com. (Side note: like it or not, almost no real-world users will use such a thing correctly; configuring your server like this seems like a Bad Move even if it's technically legal, because people are going to access the wrong thing, and that has been true for some time and irrespective of Chrome's UI changes.)” a post on the Chromium bug platform explained.
Mozilla is yet to announce this change publicly, but since it’s already available in the Nightly build, expect it to make its way to the beta version anytime soon.
According to Mozilla’s release calendar, Firefox 75 is scheduled to go live for everyone on April 7 after previously reaching the beta channel this month on the 9th.
Fingers crossed for Mozilla to offer an option to revert the changes, but even if it doesn’t, it’ll probably be just a matter of time until everyone gets used to the new approach anyway.