Basically, Google have lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.
It doesn't really make sense, though. The AOL thing was always things like "visit AOL keyword lord of the rings" at the end of trailers, and that would take you to the marketing site.
If Chrome wanted to do that, in the example gif the keyword wouldn't be just "en.wikipedia.org" for the URL article, it would be something like "wikipedia URL" that would bring you back to the page you're on through a google search.
I realize hindsight bias is at work, but I think I preferred Microsoft playing the Shitbag Monopolist role. They weren't passive aggressive about it, at least.
I see people every day searching for a brand and clicking rather than appending ".com". It's more convenient. If Google can profit off laziness, they will.
At one time, there were less organizations online but now, almost every single business, large or small, has a web presence over viable domain name scarcity.
As such, discovery service online is a necessity. Google and other search engines fill that void. Now should they completely replace domains? Probably not, at least not yet, but some other addressing scheme needs to exist if we want to be less reliant on services like Google. Personally, I just use other search engines. If I'm not finding results I fall back to Google.
But the company-wide decision to manipulate the URL as a business strategy drains all my enthusiasm. The "U" is really important! The URL is basically a filename that you use to access the data store called the Internet. Don't take it away from me by the brute force of market dominance. I need to be sure of where I'm addressing my packets. Don't tamper with that essential construct.
I use both browsers, but without Firefox, I'd be lost in the wilderness. With its recent layoffs I'm worried about the web.
The days of URLs as a data access key are gone. So many other things (cookies, etc) go into controlling what pages show that what was originally a 1:1 mapping between URL and content is now a many to many mapping. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's the web we live in now.
People might not understand how a seat belt works, it's still there and we still use them.
They take your data and everyone's regardless of if you want them too. That you don't mind hardly makes that better.
