What is the ‘www’ or ms symbol on your computer?
The www or ms symbol on your computer is a reference to the World Wide Web. The www prefix was originally used on early versions of the World Wide Web to differentiate it from other networks like ftp and gopher. The ms symbol is also used to show that the computer is running Microsoft Windows.
What does it mean and why should you care?
If you’ve ever typed in “www.example.com” into your browser, you’ve used the www (or ms) protocol. The www protocol is a way of identifying a website’s domain name (for example, www.example.com) from a user’s computer and directing the user to that website.
URLs that use the www protocol are typically accessed through the web browser by typing in the website’s complete domain name, including the “www.” portion. If you visit a website using the ms protocol instead of www, your computer will automatically type in just the first part of the domain name (for example, http://www.example.com).
The www protocol is popular because it’s easy to remember and type – just type “www.” followed by the website’s domain name.
Although most users don’t need to know about or use the www protocol, it’s still important for websites and web browsers to support it because some older browsers don’t support other protocols (for example, https://) and therefore can’t access websites using those URLs.
How to remove www from your computer
If you’re like most people, you use www on your computer quite a bit. But why? And what’s the big deal with www?
The short answer is that www is just a shortcut for your computer’s local IP address. So if you’re at home and type www.example.com into your browser, your computer will automatically connect to the website at its own local IP address (which might be 192.168.1.2 or 10.0.0.1).
The longer answer is that www is a legacy technology that’s been around since the early days of the internet. Back then, computers typically had only one IP address (or assigned to them by their ISP), so it was convenient for users to use the same address for all their websites. However, nowadays most computers have several IP addresses (usually assigned by their ISP), so using www can actually slow down your browser because it has to connect to each website individually instead of just getting the global IP address for the site (which would be 192.168.1.1 in this example).
So if you’re not using www on your computer anymore, there’s no real reason to worry… but if you are, there are
Conclusion
‘www’ is a computer term that stands for ‘World Wide Web.’ Often times, we type www into our browsers to access different websites. But why should you care? Well, because if your pc is not configured to use www, you might be opening yourself up to security risks and other online issues. By default, most modern PCs are set up to use www, so it’s important to make sure your settings stay this way. If you want to learn more about how www works and what the benefits are of using it on your computer, read on!
