They became the villain when they started deliberately positioning the ads on their search results screen to trick people. Which I'm sure makes them lots and lots of money but is definitely evil.

Google is many different companies and products, and some of them I'm so grateful for. They provide a simple product that does something magically better than the competition, don't screw with the recipe. I give them my data because I like the service.

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.

Is it really a company-wide strategy to manipulate the URL? The Chrome change was based on user studies that showed that people do not understand URLs.

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.

Doesn't matter if they understand it or not. It's the one and only barrier between you and malicious actors, or you and a monopolist. And oh look there's Google, attacking the one thing that protects the world from their ownership of the web.

People might not understand how a seat belt works, it's still there and we still use them.

Do you happen to have a link to those studies?

> I give them my data because I like the service.

They take your data and everyone's regardless of if you want them too. That you don't mind hardly makes that better.

> The comparison to AOL was my first thought also

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.

It isn't that Google built a faithful recreation of AOL's mechanism. The claim is that Google is in a very similar ecosystem position with very similar incentives to attempt to Own All The Traffic.

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'd say that it's just as common to hear "google Our Brand" as "www.brand.com" at the end of television adverts now. That's entirely anecdotal, but Google (or other search engines, but basically Google) has been for a long time the way to access sites.

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.

I tend to search the brandname if I'm not sure about what the domain is. There's quite a few Dutch brands that are either on .nl or .com. Or their brand is already in use by another company, so they've got some extra text in theirs. Or their name has a & in it and they might use "n" "en" or "and" in their actual domain.

Google doesn't like you using the term "google <something>" because that opens the door towards a genericized trademark (like xerox or cellophane), but plenty of advertisers buy keywords or a phrase on Google and then use terms like "search for <keyword or phrase> to find out more" in their radio/TV/outdoor ads.

I'm not sure if it's entirely laziness. Unless given a URI through some other medium, you can't expect to find a business by simply appending .com, .org, .net. there are only so many viable names in this structure and collisions are inevitable.

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.

The thing you mentioned doesn't like it's too far fetched for the next step :-)