Is “www” really still necessary?

by Aaron

Ever wonder why you have to type in “www.” before the actual name of the website you want to go to? Well, it’s a good question, but the answer isn’t what you wanted to hear.

Years ago, “www” used to be used to differentiate between the various protocols on the internet. That’s not the case anymore, but we still use “www” anyway. Why? Well, it has more to do with tradition than anything else. It’s one of those things that has become so ingrained into the system and society that to change it just wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t be worth the effort.

I don’t think the guys who designed the Internet so many years ago ever expected it to have evolved into what it is today. I guess we can cut them a little slack ;)

Share November 23, 2007 | Tags: , ,
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Comments

3 Responses to “Is “www” really still necessary?”

  1. Neil on November 23rd, 2007 9:23 am

    Amen! “www” be gone! It would be a big deal if we could change it though–the number of man-hours that would be saved collectively around the globe by eliminating “www” would be enormous. It might not seem like much individually, but it all adds up.

    It reminds me of a friend who worked at Microsoft who’s job it was to try to make Windows boot 0.5ms faster. Allowing 2 billion PCs to load 0.5ms faster helps people save time all over the globe.

    I wonder how much time on average we’ve spent typing in “www”. What it be hours? Days? Weeks even?

  2. Aaron on November 28th, 2007 12:14 am

    Heck I’d say it’s worse than that. If there’s 700 million people currently using the internet (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=849) and it takes about 0.75 seconds to type in a domain. And say every person types a domain once day, then you’ve got:

    700,000,000 * 0.75 / 60 (seconds) / 60 (minutes) / 24 (hours) / 365 (days) = 16.6 years wasted typing ‘www.’ each day

    Individually it might come out to, say, 5 domains a day * 0.75 * 365 (days) = 22 minutes per year

    I don’t know if that calculation makes sense, but it could be pretty significant.

  3. Laura on December 3rd, 2007 11:58 am

    LOL “16.6 years wasted typing ‘www.’ each day”. I waste 16.6 years a day on gchat alone.

    Also, another reason to get rid of the www is that it can lead to typos like forgetting the dot, and that can lead to domain squatter proliferation. Just yesterday I typed wwwpricegrabber.com, and somebody had their fake money trap there. Doesn’t that URL seem like one PriceGrabber should’ve snapped up to redirect stupid people like me to their actual site. This just once again proves my theory that PriceGrabber stinks.