So you're whining because this one website makes you do what everyone's in the 90s had to do so the time? Well everyone smart enough to realize that being tech savvy is a good idea. A lot of people I went to HS now have a Facebook account at most and it's funny and pathetic.
If you find the relevant department and start harassing them on Twitter and other socials at least once a day they will eventually fix it. This has happened before with other departments and security issues. My record is eight days.
maybe some browsers interpret a bare hostname without protocol specifier as an http address, and some as an https address.
And if you have a browser that does the former I would suggest finding a better one soon. The internet is moving away from unencrypted HTTP, a browser that doesn't default to HTTPS nowadays is pretty strange.
While I do mostly agree with your statement, it's incredibly annoying when I type in a local IP for my router or server and it automatically gets turned into https.
Hilariously, I bet it's because their Active Directory domain is the same as their public domain, and it becomes a massive pain in the ass to hostname the root domain. Yes, externally you can do it just fine, but then it's not consistent internally on their private network.
One solution is you run IIS (or any other web server) purely as a permanent redirect for the internal host, but it would then need to run on each domain controller which brings its own set of issues.
Lol oh I never said it's a good solution. The worst part isn't running IIS, it's running IIS on a domain controller. The better option is using a different domain for AD than your web domain, as long as it's a publicly registered domain for certificate purposes.
My favorite is sometimes when I'm on hold the announcements tell you to visit their website for faster service (would if I could have!). It reads out the URL to you like "double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com. Again, that's double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com"
And if you actually type the "www", you get redirected to the base domain without it.
In the early days of the internet that was actually the correct way to do things. Websites were supposed to be hosted at the www.thisstupidcompany.comr content was supposed to go to places like ftp.whatever.com. Technically they should redirect thisstupidcompany.com to www.thisstupidcompany.com not the other way around. All that said though that concept has kind of fallen by the wayside as it became increasingly apparent that most hosts exist primarily to host websites with other uses as secondary so it became the norm to just assume the www when navigating to the root domain.
I remember listening to radio commercials in the early days where it was:
Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon, forward slash, forward slash, double-you, double-you, double-you, dot nameofthecompany dot com, forward slash, tilde - you know, that squiggly line on the key to the left of the number one on your keyboard, you have to press shift for it - and then the word 'customer'.