[X4U] Leopard Issues - Some Responses

[David Ledger]

>From: Jon Warms <jwarms at mac.com>
>2) Yeah, I thought it was Verizon playing tricks. Maybe it is, but
>the PowerBook running Tiger and earlier versions of Firefox and Safari
>uses domain-guessing like it always did. More telling, when I
>boot the MacBook into Tiger and run the older browser versions,
>domain-guessing also works. Obviously, something is happening
>on my MacBook, not on Verizon's network. I don't understand what;
>I wish someone knowledgeable could help me.

More a matter of vaguely remembering the history.

Early browsers like Mosaic originally didn't give any such help. They 
didn't even add the 'http://'. Can't remember if it was Mosaic or an 
early  Netscape when they added automatic extension. If a dns lookup 
on the host part you typed didn't resolve it tried variants. 
Certainly 'http://www' and possibly others were added to the front 
and checked. Various things were tried on the end in turn. These 
included '.com' and '.co.uk' IIRC but the list was built in. It was 
purely a browser function. (You don't mention the addittion of 
'http://' but that still happens).

My guess is that it's still really a browser function, but as current 
Mac browsers use Apple's Webkit it may have moved into there and so 
be a part of the OS.

Maybe the list of which parts to add is either learned or is supplied 
by the ISP. The Delta Airlines example would suggest the ISP. It's 
also possible that it comes from any Google/whatever bits that are 
embedded for automatic searching.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk