I don't doubt that Googlers believe this is a useful change, but that belief is borne out of their own vested interest in deprecating traditional web navigation. That's really the best light you can put it in, considering how utterly user-hostile this decision is.
The best light you can put it in is that removing unnecessary parts of the URL makes it easier for less advanced users to understand what the URL consists of, helping them use "traditional web navigation".
To be fair, Google has previously experimented with hiding the entire path part of the URL, which does hinder URL-based navigation by making the displayed text unusable as a URL. However, that's different from this change, where typing the displayed text into a browser's URL bar would normally get you to the same page (unless the site is configured strangely).
> removing unnecessary parts of the URL makes it easier for less advanced users to understand what the URL consists of, helping them use "traditional web navigation".
How? If the users are supposed to learn "what the URL consists of", how removing and hiding all but one piece of it helps?
It's like saying, "to make postal addresses easier to understand, we'll hide everything except the recipient's name and surname".
If I want to go to facebook, all I need to write in the address bar is "facebook.com", but the displayed address is "https://www.facebook.com/". A naive user would believe that they need to write the entire "https://www.facebook.com/" instead of just the short version to navigate to facebook, which is too cumbersome for them so they just use google search to find it instead.
That is site-specific behavior. It depends on a redirect from http://facebook.com/ to https://www.facebook.com/ which may not exist for all sites. If the user wants to end up at the proper page without risking an insecure redirect over HTTP then they do need to type the entire URL.
I would support making HTTPS the default when a URL fragment is entered without an explicit scheme, and site operators should just drop the obsolete www domain name prefix. However, the browser should not be masking the full name of the site you're visiting. At the very least it should verify that www.example.com and example.com resolve to the same IP address(es) and use the same TLS certificate before presenting them as equivalent, though that still doesn't guarantee that they have the same content.
You're right, and my experience was clouding my judgment. It's a hostile decision to me only because I know and care about the difference between a domain and a subdomain.
I thought I'd be able to find a counter-example where the two forms of URL get handled differently - perhaps by redirecting the bare URL to "m" but still serving the desktop version on "www" - but a quick survey of whatever sites happen to be open in my browser right now says nobody does that.
From a tech literacy standpoint I still dislike the obfuscation, but /shrug.
