It's really disturbing how many would be indistinguishable (to almost everyone) from malware servers. Lots of .net domains and entities I've never heard of.
A non-technical person's computer is often a source of agitation for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes those reasons are reasonable. Sometimes they are not.
I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by speculating what Aunt Tilly might think of a long list of human-unfriendly domain names.
> It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain.
Meaning the .com is basically just the UI that sends all its information to the .net to be processed, then back to the .com to be rendered? What's the benefit of that to the company, instead of having it all on the .com site?
I can't tell you why you'd want to have a front office/back office split like that, but I could speculate: Domains are cheap, and it might reduce cognitive overhead to have a .com/.net operational split.
Part of it is removing extra data when requesting style sheets and such - there's no need for a browser to send all of the set cookies it has for your web application when it's fetching styles, so people buy separate domains for them.
The problem is you can't explicitly tell a browser to fetch a cookie from cookie.example.com - and when you have multiple subdomains which rely on the cookie, plus analytics software which sets it for the whole domain, you can't do that.
Sort of: If you only ever need a cookie set on app.example.com, you can do that and use assets.example.com. It'll work for simple applications and not much else.
Things like Google Analytics also set cookies by default on *.example.com so you'll have to figure out a way around that.
This is not an authoritative or trustworthy measure in the least, but from running Little Snitch (and denying most things), I'd say OS X tries to contact maybe a quarter of those domains, maybe half as many. And that's not just on boot.
BN1WNS2011508.wns.windows.com
OneSettings-bn2.metron.live.com.nsatc.net
a978.i6g1.akamai.net
americas2.notify.windows.com.akadns.net
any.edge.bing.com
bingads.microsoft.com
bl3302.storage.live.com
bl3302geo.storage.dkyprod.akadns.net
client.wns.windows.com
corp.sts.microsoft.com
diagnostics.support.microsoft.com
directory.services.live.com
directory.services.live.com.akadns.net
dns.msftncsi.com
en-us.appex-rf.msn.com
fe3.delivery.dsp.mp.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
fe3.delivery.mp.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
ipv6.msftncsi.com
ipv6.msftncsi.com.edgesuite.net
login.live.com
login.live.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
register.mesh.com
settings-win.data.microsoft.com
settings.data.glbdns2.microsoft.com
skyapi.live.net
skyapi.skyprod.akadns.net
skydrive.wns.windows.com
ssw.live.com
ssw.live.com.nsatc.net
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
travel.tile.appex.bing.com
v10.vortex-win.data.metron.life.com.nsatc.net
v10.vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
wildcard.appex-rf.msn.com.edgesuite.net
win10.ipv6.microsoft.com
win10.ipv6.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
wns.notify.windows.com.akadns.net
www.bing.com
www.bingads.microsoft.com