seriously, you still type www. in front of a domain name in 2026 ?

In the early 90s, the Web was not the only service on the Internet. It was one service among many. To distinguish between different services, subdomains were used: www indicated a web service, while other subdomains such as ftp, mail, or gopher were used for other services.

Today, the Web has become the main way most people use the Internet. Other services still exist, but many are either less visible to the public or limited to specific use cases. The www subdomain is now mostly a relic of the past, and it is no longer necessary to type it before a domain name.

But why they used subdomains in the first place, they could have used the protocol name instead, like http://example.com or ftp://example.com ? The reason is that the protocol name is not part of the domain name, and it can change over time. For example, a website that was originally served over HTTP may later switch to HTTPS, but the domain name remains the same. By using subdomains, the service can be identified independently of the protocol used to access it.

the users also don't need to know the protocol name, they just need to know the domain name. The browser will automatically use the appropriate protocol based on the user's preferences and the server's configuration. This makes it easier for users to access websites without having to remember the protocol name or type it in manually.

Today, the use of subdomains is still common for organizational purposes, such as separating different sections of a website or providing different services under the same domain name. However, the use of www as a subdomain is no longer necessary for most websites, and many have chosen to drop it altogether.