What is the difference between http://www.example.com and http://example.com?

Answer 1

The difference is the "www" part.

Answer 2

You should be go to the same web page just fine.

Here's the history of "www."

There is no technical reason for a website's name to start with "www"; indeed, the first Web server was at info.cern.ch. The "www" prefix comes from a common convention predating the Web, where an organization's Internet servers are assigned hostnames corresponding to the protocol they serve; for example, many organizations gave their main public Gopher server a name of the form gopher.wherever.edu and named their public FTP server in the form ftp.name.gov. Some organizations extend this convention by using the prefixes "www2", "www3", "www4", etc., for multiple related Web servers. Some browsers will automatically try adding "www." to the beginning, and possibly ".com" to the end, of typed URLs if a web page isn't found without them. With the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers, pressing the Control and Enter keys simultaneously will actually prefix 'http://www.' and suffix '.com' ('.com/' in Firefox) to whatever has been typed into the address box.

Based on that, even if you don't type "www.", IE and Firefox will add it in for you.

Answer 3

Both will work. In fact, if you just type example.com in the address bar, it will work as well.

Not really sure why all the extra stuff is there.

Answer 4

They are both identical, however the "www" portion indicates that it is the primary aspect of the site, however through the site's control panel, you can make subdomains that change that (for example: forums.example.com or games.example.com)

the http:// part indicates it's a web page, and not a file-transfer area (aka ftp://).