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Firefox gives greater visibility to domains

Kevin Murphy, June 27, 2011, Domain Tech

Mozilla has reportedly dropped the http:// from the address bar in the latest pre-release version of the Firefox browser, in order to make the domain more prominent.
The changes, spotted over at ConceivablyTech, would also remove the trailing slash from URLs and present everything other than the top and second level of the domain in gray text.
So instead of
http://www.example.com/
you’d see something like
www.example.com
Google Chrome already does something similar, although it presents the lower levels of the domain in the same shade text as the top two.
The blog reported that the https:// will continue to be displayed for encrypted pages.
Earlier this year, Google was reported to be working on a Chrome UI that dropped the address bar altogether, which struck me as one of the more idiotic ideas — from a choice of many — to come out of the company.

Browser makers brush me off on DNSSEC support

Kevin Murphy, July 29, 2010, Domain Tech

A couple of weeks back, I emailed PR folk at Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Opera, asking if they had any plans to provide native support for DNSSEC in their browsers.
As DNS uber-hacker Dan Kaminsky and ICANN president Rod Beckstrom have been proselytizing this week at the Black Hat conference, support at the application layer is the next step if DNSSEC is to quickly gain widespread traction.
The idea is that one day the ability to validate DNSSEC messages will be supported by browsers in much the same way as SSL certificates are today, maybe by showing the user a green address bar.
CZ.NIC has already created a DNSSEC validator plugin for Firefox that does precisely that, but as far as I can tell there’s no native support for the standard in any browser.
These are the responses I received:

Mozilla: “Our team is heads down right now with Firefox 4 beta releases so unfortunately, I am not going to be able to get you an answer.”

Microsoft: “At this stage, we’re focusing on the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview releases. The platform preview is a developer and designer scoped release of Internet Explorer 9, and is not feature complete, we will have more to share about Internet Explorer 9 in the future.”
Google: No reply.
Opera: No reply.

In 11 years of journalism, Apple’s PR team has never replied to any request for information or comment from me, so I didn’t bother even trying this time around.
But the responses from the other four tell us one of two things:

  • Browser makers haven’t started thinking about DNSSEC yet.

Or…

  • Their PR people were just trying to brush me off.

I sincerely hope it’s the former, otherwise this blog post has no value whatsoever.