Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?
That’s not true. It’s usually not there, and unlike “http(s)://”, the browser doesn’t assume it for you. www.example.com and example.com can be different websites, so a browser cannot assume the “www”.
In fact try going to your own instance: www.pawb.social
It doesn’t work with “www”.
If you just entered “reddit.com” into the address bar, it will automatically assume the www. in front. If there’s another valid address such as “old.reddit.com,” you need to enter the prefix in place of www or it will just go to www.reddit.com. 🤦♂️
Websites that don’t use the www subdomain and are valid without it won’t have it get automatically added, but if it’s not valid it will attempt to use the www subdomain and either give a 404 because it doesn’t exist or will send you to a different site than you expect.
There was a time when you couldn’t even have “reddit.com” work at all without actually typing the www. part. Just like when websites aren’t secure and the automatic HTTPS needs to have the S removed so the page can load.
No it won’t, it will go to “reddit.com”. Then Reddit will respond with a redirect to “www.reddit.com”. You can see that yourself in your browser’s developer console.
I never said the browser does it. I just said it was assumed and not necessary to be typed into the browser.
If you didn’t mean the browser, then I don’t see how this makes any sense:
What’s “it” here which is attempting something? It’s not the website since the address was not valid, and a website wouldn’t redirect you to a “www” if it wasn’t valid either and was going to result in a 404. So who’s “attempting” to unsuccessfully use the “www” subdomain?