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I need a list of web browser address bar behaviors, as part of a research experiment. For example:

1) The most basic behavior is to type a full web address, e.g. http://www.abc.com and press ENTER to navigate to the web site.

2) Typing just a domain name (e.g. abc) and pressing CTRL+ENTER (on Windows) automatically prepends the http:// and appends the .com and navigates to the web site.

3) In some cases typing abc.com and pressing ENTER navigates to http://www.abc.com - what is the precise heuristic here?

... etc.

animuson
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bright
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    So you want us to do the research for you? – Šime Vidas Jan 28 '11 at 20:26
  • What do you consider typical? Internet Explorer? Some things such as navigating to typing abc.com but navigating to somewhere else don't have anything to do with the address bar (like whether the site requires https or not). – Ocelot20 Jan 28 '11 at 20:27
  • Sime - oh please, come off it. Obviously I'm not simply trying to compile these behaviors - that is hardly novel work :) – bright Jan 28 '11 at 20:32
  • @bright AFAIK No browser will prepend "www." to a URL. That's always something the specific server handles by redirecting. – user229044 Jan 28 '11 at 20:35
  • Ocelot - well, there is at least some address bar behavior there - adding the http://, at a minimum. The www. is possibly a redirect - but it would be interesting to know if any browsers actually add it themselves for performance or other reasons. Edit: @meagar indicates the latter does not occur. – bright Jan 28 '11 at 20:35
  • @bright Usually, when presenting a question on SO, you want to show that you have done some initial research yourself. btw you have to prepend "@" if you want the person (that you're replying to) to get notified. – Šime Vidas Jan 28 '11 at 21:14
  • Download a few browsers and find out for yourself... They're all free. – Cody Gray - on strike Jan 29 '11 at 08:05

1 Answers1

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As for 3), I do think that it's a redirect, which is being done on the server-side (that is, the server notices you are trying to access the domain directly and redirects to www.*), so no browser-specific behavior here.

And Google Chrome for example treats everything that does not have a valid top-level domain suffix or protocol prefix (such as http://) as a search query, which, on pressing Enter, leads you to Google.com?q={query}

Jono
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fresskoma
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