I noticed just today that, when visiting web sites with url’s beginning with ‘www’ while using the Chrome web browser, the browser systematically strips the ‘www’ part off the URL so that, rather than the url displaying as https://www.cnn.com, for example, it displays as https://cnn.com. When I Googled (eyeroll) that behavior, I found this article, authored in September of 2018, so apparently this has been going on for quite a while (since Chrome version 69, in fact).
I don’t like entities toying with my data. What in the world were they thinking when they decided to strip this out? Their explanation is because it’s a “trivial” part of the URL. Okay, so does that mean that the stripping of the .com part is next???
Thankfully, the article linked above describes a workaround for this, which I will post below just in case the article goes away at some point down the road:
For now, users can force Chrome to display the full address by disabling the flag ‘Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Scheme and Trivial Subdomains’ at chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains.
If this behavior annoys you as much as it did me, you now have the fix.