I just can't remember the last time I typed
www.
in the browser URL bar.

There were times when a webpage spits out a 404 error when we didn't typed www.

Can anyone explain this?
Is the web standard changed, or is the browser doing it for me secretly?

And do you guys/gals still type that www?

Www is just a sub domain for a domain. This is all configured server side, nothing with the browser :)

@linuxxx aha!

The first thing i do when i purchase a new domain, is to go to DNS and create 2 A records pointing to my webserver, one being @ and the other www
Granddad

The browser(s?) nowadays do that automatically for you

@gitpull for example FF :)

@gitpull Nope they don't. Most servers are just already configured correctly.

Source: me having to explain this to customers who just don't (want to) understand it.

@linuxxx thanks. Now you did correct a thing that was taught to me by my "networking and operating systems" teacher. He told us that browsers nowadays are doing it by themselves. But only the browsers.
Seems like that was wrong.

Good to know that this isn't the case

Just the other day I visited a site NOT configured correctly, that demanded the www to be typed in to show the pages 😵

@gurumeditation half a year ago, i think i found a site that only worked when www wasnt typed in. Dont ask why i would bother to type www.. xD

The last time I bought a domain, the www @ and * entry were set automatically during registration.

And since I had to setup the webserver to serve www. requests with the same content like without, I am quite sure, the browsers are still stupid when it comes to this - at least most of them.

As @linuxxx already said, the browsers do NOT do that automatically because it's a subdomain that you might want to or might not want to use... You can even have one website on site.com and another on www.site.com even though that would be confusing... There were religious arguments for using only one of them instead of both and with that, obviously, www camps and no www camps... Unfortunately, the standard is still to just use both to point to the same website... However, if you see a website that doesn't do both it might be actually a feature as opposed to a misconfiguration, depending on the webmaster.
Don't have references at the moment as I'm on my way to bed and it was a long time ago that I read up on that war (and haven't heard anything about that in years), but searching the web for www vs without www or something like that should yield lots of results on the subject...

@rasm945i First thing I do with a new site is set up a .htaccess redirect from www to /

@Inigo why not just an A record on the DNS server?

@rasm945i Force of habit. Easier if you don't have immediate access to the registrar. Plus there used to be SEO implications for having both versions of the domain (though I don't think this is the case any longer)

@Inigo ah, okai