If the browser absolutely 100% of the time knew that difference and showed "Wikipedia FR > Canada", wouldn't it be much simpler for the average user?

The browser could even show specialized UI such as "FR" as a clickable dropdown menu to allow users to switch languages. Chrome already does this for searching a single website through the address bar (type domain.com TAB)

Basically these changes are not thought for you. You are not representative of the average Web user.

No, it's really important to retain all those dots and slashes. This is not sarcasm. I'm being completely serious when I say this. It's really easy notation, and the differentiation of context for dots, slashes, question marks and hashtags is really useful.

  Wikipedia FR > Canada

I look at that angle bracket with the white space, and I get chills. And I'm not even drawing attention to that oh-so-glaring omission of the /wiki/ context. Truly horrifying.

Repeat. This is not sarcasm.

Dark roads ahead, friends.

Hiding the URL would be a terrible idea, no matter how much "simpler" it would be for the average user: it would either only be enabled for a handful of websites chosen by Google (which would mean having an inconsistent UI) or create a lot of security issues (what if someone creates a website and manages to also display "Wikipedia FR" with a similar layout?).

Maybe it could show "Canada - Wikipedia" like the page authors intended as a title. Maybe if the page authors want to have links between languages, they could code that in a standard markup language themselves.

These aren't decisions for a useragent to make, and there aren't enough browsers out there that people have a reasonable choice.

Bastardising the url isn't a solution to anything, it's a step towards something that Google, not users, want (in making AMP "trivial").

A useragent is literally a user's agent, it is supposed to help its user browse their target website. It is not supposed to help the target website show things to the user.