Its OK, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said typing “//” wasted people’s time and required them to use more paper. “I could have designed it to not have ‘//’. Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the ‘//’,” he admitted.

Not only does he have regrets regarding the the double backslash, but has also hinted recently that even using the ‘www’ was a waste of time and energy.

• “www” is redundant.
• “www” is hard to say, much better to ‘wibbley, wobbly, web’.
• “www” is a waste of time to type or write.
• Think about it. Did you read something cool at “www.funky-software.net”, or did you read it at “funky-software.net”
• “www” is old school and just no longer needed.

If you want to silently change your site from “www.domain.com” to “domain.com” you can do it with 3 lines of code. Place this code in your .htaccess file to redirect your “www.domain.com” to “domain.com” without disturbing visitors or your current search engine rankings:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Its an easy thing to do for most people using an Open Source hosting environment.