News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The importance of “http://” by nhebb on Sunday April 18, 2010 @09:08AM (#1274773)
They still do that. One of the first things I do on a new Windows system is to turn that "feature" off.
Re:The importance of “http://” by pavlov on Sunday April 18, 2010 @10:44AM (#1274891)
To be fair, Mac OS X does the same by default.
Re:The importance of “http://” by GHFigs on Sunday April 18, 2010 @03:15PM (#1275296)
An important difference is that you can still change the extension. Suppose you have a file called "foo.zip" and wish to change it to "foo.cbz"

On Windows, renaming the file makes appears to work, and the interface will indeed show "foo.cbz". But what it actually does is rename the file "foo.cbz.zip". The actual extension remains entirely hidden and untouchable as long as the global option to hide extensions is turned on.

On the Mac, changing the name to "foo.cbz" will prompt a warning that you might cause the file to open in a different application, and IIRC presents the options of naming it "foo.cbz.zip" or "foo.cbz".

Neither approach is perfect, but I think what this illustrates is the difference between walling off complexity and just hiding it. We see the same difference with Chrome, as hiding http:// is just visual, but the altered way of copying URLs to the clipboard is actually blocking the user's access to that complexity.

Re:The importance of “http://” by uriel on Sunday April 18, 2010 @02:07PM (#1275183)
And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.
Re:The importance of “http://” by edd on Sunday April 18, 2010 @02:41PM (#1275242)
Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Show all filename extensions
Re:The importance of “http://” by superchink on Sunday April 18, 2010 @02:39PM (#1275238)
http://cl.ly/UA5 (Finder Preferences)