> Browsers have already largely hacked off the protocol in the front

Funny thing is that Firefox decided to hide the "http://" when Google decided it must be done, and now the "https://" used mostly everywhere is safe, because there is absolutely no excuse to hiding things that change.

But the real problem is that the web is currently dominated by entities that are interested on obfuscating it. Yes, domain names reading backwards is a really bad decision, but there is no reason to keep composing it by hiding the end of URLs, confusing URLs with search terms, and formatting everything the same.