What would you say about "www.", then? Shouldn't that be removed as meaningless, as opposed to the protocol prefix which a) identifies something as a URL, b) makes it detectable and parseable?

Well that's not really up to the browser maker to remove. The domain owner makes choices about subdomains and dns records. So if the domain owner deems www as the location for something, that can't be abstracted away.

Not really www.foo.com is distinct from foo.com. http:// is pretty redundant - you usually only want to specify the protocol if its not http.

I doubt that the "average" person would realize that foo.com is different from www.foo.com — or that they could even be different.

But they would probably see abc.foo.com as different from xyz.foo.com

The www. prefix is a special case for people; it literally means "its the world wide web" or "its the internet" to them. Technically, the subdomain is irrelevant. But, most people don't know this. They don't know how the internet works and (I'd suspect that this is true in more cases than you might think), think that www. is needed to get to whatever site they want to visit.

Of course, this is all assuming that they even type the address in, rather then searching.

I generally just type in the name of the site that I want:

'amazon' for www.amazon.com

Firefox is generally smart enough to take me to where I want to go. The only issue is when some hack site games it's way to the top of a search result for something else, but I've only run into that a few times.

Which is itself an issue -- since many browsers are now turning the 'address bar' into a combo search+address bar, novice users may not even realize what the difference is (or was).

You are right - but I think there is a difference in that omitting http:// doesn't break so many things.

Try this link: http://www.news.ycombinator.com for example - this is what happens to most addresses not prefixed with www. This means that hiding the www. would mean waiting to work out that the site doesn't exist (or the connection is down) before trying the non www. version, and worse that you would get the wrong site if www.foo.com and foo.com were distinct. Hiding the http:// doesn't have such massive implementation issues.

Right. My point was supposed to be that the average user doesn't know about these implications. And since it actually makes a difference in what page is viewed, don't hide the www. from them. Sorry if I wasn't too clear.

What's worse is that a lot of sites will dns-map foo.com to www.foo.com properly, but the ssl certificates will only be for www.foo.com.

Omitting the http prefix breaks the links (makes them relative) in some contexts, like some blog comments.

I think people should learn about the http prefix anyway. Even our grandmas. To do that, the best we can do is to let it appear in the url bar.

But we're not talking about removing http:// from actual urls, just from the display in the address bar. I guess you're saying that seeing it in the address bar highlights that it's an important part of an actual url, which is useful for education?

I do. At least, when untrained people consistently see this prefix, they will be less surprised when they actually have to use it (like when copy-pasting). Or they could ask what this gibberish actually mean.

The article author makes a good point about replacing the http:// and friends with a set of icons rather than removing it entirely.