Google-chrome – Why does Google Chrome automatically add www. prefix for some websites but it does not add it for others

google-chromesubdomain

It adds it to my website but it does not add it to google.org for example. My website DNS records looks like the following:

Host Name | IP Address/Url | Record Type   | TTL
@         | <server ip>    | A (Address)   | 1800
www       | @              | CNAME (Alias) | 1800

I may decide to point the www sub-domain to another server (even if it is not recommended), why does chrome consider it is alright to automatically add the www sub-domain? Does it analyze at the DNS records before deciding to add the prefix?

Edit: Interesting how if I navigate to www.google.org, then the next time I try to get to google.org, chrome automatically adds the prefix even if it didn't do that before. Strange and nondeterministic behavior in my opinion.

Edit2: As another user pointed out, it may be an issue caused by Settings -> Show advanced settings -> uncheck Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar or the app launcher search box setting.

How to reproduce (using my faculty's website):

Type ace.tuiasi.ro in the Google Chrome. It should navigate to www.ace.tuiasi.ro and it works
Now type ace.tuiasi.ro in the Mozilla Firefox. It navigates to ace.tuiasi.ro and it does not work (because they have a bad DNS configuration and only the www. sub-domain points to the actual server ip).

Notice: Because it may be related to their suggestion engine, it may not reproduce in your case.

Edit3: Ok, so I noticed that I have to type the http:// prefix so that I can bypass Chrome's suggestion engine in comparison with Firefox, where I can type it without the prefix. I think this tricked me into thinking it does this every time, when it doesn't. I will close the question as solved.

Best Answer

Ok, so I noticed that I have to type the http:// prefix so that I can bypass Chrome’s suggestion engine in comparison with Firefox, where I can type it without the prefix. I think this tricked me into thinking it does this every time, when in fact it doesn’t, it was only my history that appeared as suggestion, and I used the www. variant in the past.

I will close the question as solved.

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enter image description here

Networking Subdomains – How to Host Different Machines with Different Subdomains

I have what I regard as a fairly straightforward solution, though I'm the first to admit that it is not a high-performance one. Since I am on ADSL, information from my home server is down-loaded at my up-load speeds, so performance is not a primary concern.

Because I already had it, I used a small web-site on a public host (equivalent to myname.Public.Host in your example).
My domain registrar offers a minimal package of domain registration and web-site / e-mail forwarding.
I forward my primary domain to the public web-site (myname.Public.Host).
I use web-site folders, rather than subdomains to address my home servers, so that (using your example) I would address the cloud server with www.myname.tk/cloud, though I see no reason that a CNAME record for cloud.myname.tk can't point to the same address (myname.public.host/cloud/), though I haven't tried it.
I create myname.public.host/cloud/index.htm containing the following code (I'm sorry, I can't acknowledge the source of this code, as I've lost the reference):

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>AFH - Web Server Home</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1; URL=http://myname.Dynamic.DNS/cloud">
</head>
<html>

This is how I use it, but for my WebCam I use URL=http://myname.Dynamic.DNS:WebCamPort: my router is able to map WebCamPort to 80 on the WebCam's IP, and this seems to work well: although I'm using ports, this is completely transparent when the site is accessed as www.myname.tk/WebCam.
In principle, you can use the same technique, so myname.public.host/cloud/index.htm would transfer you to URL=http://myname.Dynamic.DNS:CloudPort, etc, and the different ports provide you with a simple way to address the different servers on your intranet.

In summary, cloud.myname.tk would be forwarded to myname.Public.Host/cloud/index.htm and from there transferred to http://myname.Dynamic.DNS:CloudPort and then through the router to your cloud server.

As a final note, I at one time had difficulty in finding a reliable dynamic DNS server, so I implemented my own, by running a script every five minutes which checks my home's public IP and, whenever this changes, calls an FTP script to update the index.htm files in each of the folders, replacing URL=http://myname.Dynamic.DNS ... by URL=http://my.pub.IP.addr ... (this is easy in Linux, but more of a challenge on Windows, where my web server resides).

From the length of this answer, you may question its straightforwardness, but each of the stages is pretty simple, and I gradually arrived at this solution step-by-step, and it now works reliably. You should check that you can create the appropriate CNAME record before you do any more work on implementing it.

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