This is ridiculous. Of course it makes a difference. The address bar is how basically 100% of users know what site they are on.

If this were truly the case (that it didn't matter), the argument can be made that there is no reason to change the host -- just show it as google.com like it does now. The only reason that you'd want the address bar to show a different domain (i.e. the "author" rather than "publisher") is exactly because it _does matter_ to the user!

Google would know that you clicked on the link, and the URL you visited but that doesn't necessarily mean they know what the content on the page you requested was. In practice, most of the time it would, but since a site could serve very different pages to different users it wouldn't always be the case.

> It makes no difference at that point what is shown in the address bar, as the page has already been served.

Some things should be kept sacred to protect users and the address bar is one of those things. It should always display where content is coming from. browsers have been degrading the address bar for ages (turning it into a search box/advertising platform, or hiding parts of the URL from the user) but this really is a step too far.

At this point we really need a separate browser feature that shows us what server we're actually communicating with (host, cache, CDN, etc). The address bar itself is pretty much useless now.

I gave up information on what site I was visiting, but if I enter any information on the page, won't that still go to Google? It's going to look like I have an https end-to-end channel with the site I'm visiting, but really Google is Man-In-The-Middleing the whole thing?