Random nitpick

[Thomas A. Fine]

"It's been a long time I think since any browser has been case-sensitive"

   --   @LinusTech, on the WAN show, April 25, 2025.

Incorrect.  Browsers are still case sensitive.  And URLs (the path part) are also always case sensitive.  Many web sites choose to make their paths case insensitive, but many do not.

And let's be clear that in the WAN show, Linus highlighted this by changing the path portion of the URL, not the domain (which is case insensitive).

 

Sure, this is a nitpick,insofar as a promotional URL like this ought to be completely case insensitive**.  But even now today in 2025, case insensitive paths are not default behavior, and have to be configured in web servers one way or another.

**But as it turns out, Linus is even more wrong here because the promotional URL used in the show (at this moment) is not truly case insensitive.  "/wan" works and "/WAN" works but "/wAn" does not work, which means they must manually configured both paths to redirect to the same thing, but didn't do it in a truly case insensitive way.

 

URLs (and therefore browsers) must remain case sensitive to the path portion of the URL basically forever, because of how URLs work and because URLs (in theory) can have infinite lifetimes.

See?  This is actual proof that Linus hates hot dogs.

Get off my lawn.

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, Thomas A. Fine said:

Browsers are still case sensitive.  And URLs (the path part) are also always case sensitive.  Many web sites choose to make their paths case insensitive, but many do not.

In other words, it's not up to the browser at all. It's the web server who decides whether to distinguish between example.com/path and example.com/Path.

 

The browser simply sends what you type in. It would be an error for it to change the URL to lowercase/uppercase, because that could prevent users from reaching resources the web server does treat as case sensitive.