I have a personal website, let's call it "www.myname.com", that is visited somewhat frequently by various people. However, when they are sent to my website, will Chrome correctly inform them they are currently viewing "www.myname.com"? No. It (incorrectly and baselessly) assumes the www must be meaningless, and lies to the user by showing the website address as simply "myname.com" instead.
The crux of the issue is that the root domain "myname.com" does NOT point to my website, and will simply time out without a response. There is nothing I can do to fix this. My domain host does not allow ALIAS records on the root domain, only A records. Conversely, my server host (Heroku) does not allow A records for routing, only ALIAS. As such, I'm stuck with the www solution.
Basically, if a visitor remembers the address Chrome shows them on my website and tries to revisit it via "myname.com", they will simply be sent into the void, with no idea of what is happening.
There is no justification for hiding the subdomain from the url. The subdomain and the root domain point to DIFFERENT locations, and Chrome will NEVER know if the difference is significant or not. Redirecting www to the root domain is just a cultural norm. What's next? Showing "fruit.com" when you visit "apple.com" because it's linguistically similar and maybe could point to the same place? Apparently showing the correct address of the website doesn't matter, so I see no reason not to.
And what's the potential upside for the user? Saving 3 characters and a dot in the address bar. Is it really worth breaking the domain name system for that?
Stop it, please.
P.S. Everything I've mentioned above applies to Safari as well.
P.P.S. I suspect people will tell me to change domain host or server host. I'm looking into it, but it's a hassle and it would be nice to know Chrome isn't trying to actively trick my visitors in the meantime.