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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Good for them. The new TLDs are really worthless in my opinion. For instance they already have .net and added .network.

The majority of people will recognize .com and maybe .net. Beyond that it's a stretch in my opinion and you're only going to get visitors via searches or links. I can't imagine anyone is going to think "oh I wonder what microsoft's latest press releases are; I'll just go to microsoft.press". No, they're going to search for it.

In all honesty domains in general are not very user friendly. I wouldn't be surprised if they are eventually replaced for a system that's more of a search than anything. I mean just look at all of the domain names being squatted on and for what? Half the times you can pick a different domain name, still name your product what you want and people will still find you due to search.

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I wouldn't be surprised if they are eventually replaced for a system that's more of a search than anything.

There's no need to replace anything. Nobody[1] uses domain names any more to browse the web. That's what Google, the default browser home page, and the omni-bar is for. I don't know a single non-web-developer who uses domain names. Everybody just drops "facebook" or "google"(?!) in the search box that shows up when the browser opens.

1. Well, nobody except for a rounding error number of people who hang out in places like HN.

I don't know a single non-web-developer who uses domain names

I get your point about the general public, but there is more to the internet and domain names than web browsing :)

Hell I'm a developer and sorta technical and I can never remember the URL/domain to login to Office 365. So I end up using Google and trying to find a reasonable-looking result and then check for a cert that looks right.

But that's only because Microsoft made it so damn hard to find anything related to Office 365.

And that is why Chrome did away with the bookmark pane. What people do today is largely determined by their choice of browser. I use FF and bookmark my login urls. We are discussing the problems of domain names--part of the basic infrastructure of modern communication for the entire world--in light of the fallout from what was nothing but a calculated decision to increase market share by a single company, which given the history of ICANN, is apparently more influential than most governments of the world, and of the G7, on this point. That should be a wake up call.

https://www.office.com gets you to the main landing page.

It's actually faster to Google and follow the link than to deal with the convoluted system on Office.com.

I do, but I suppose I'm included in that rounding error.

(It drives everyone else who's used my laptop for anything crazy - typing something in the address bar only searches my history / bookmarks, no remote communication. If you want to search, use the search bar.)

Though, that being said, I find myself only rarely typing ULs. More of the time the browser is pulling the URL from bookmarks / history.

I have firefox configured to search just my history and even that gets cripplingly slow. I'm incessantly frustrated by the preposterous need for resources of web browsers.

Domain names are meant for naming hosts on a network, not for naming websites which seems to have been forgotten.

No, "the goal of domain names is to provide a mechanism for naming resources in such a way that the names are usable in different hosts, networks, protocol families, internets, and administrative organizations" and they "are not required to have a one-to-one correspondence with host names, host addresses, or any other type of information."

- RFCs 882 and 883 (1983).

A website is one of those resources.

I think you missed the point I tried to make.

DNS is 15 years older then HTTP so of course it's not meant to be used that way. Domain names where put in different configuration files once, and then your mail client, IRC client, NTP client and so on just worked forever. With HTTP you suddenly started to use domain names by typing them over and over agian.

Personally I'm not sure the web will look like this in the future. I think domain names will be hidden from users once again. Netflix will of course use domain names internally to get content from their servers, but the user only needs to find the Netflix app from som App-store.

I don't see how email addresses were much different than HTTP URLs - they just worked iﬀ you had a contact stored, but that's equivalent to bookmarks.

I also don't see domain names becoming invisible any time soon, simply because linking is too damn useful, and most companies have to incentive to destroy that.

The TLD's are not about searches, they are about that universal title that hangs in that text input constantly hovering over the top of all your content.

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