They have wanted to kill the URL for a long time. The mask often slips. There have been so many half baked attempts trotted out, and nobody liked them. every br

They have wanted to kill the URL for a long time. The mask often slips. There have been so many half baked attempts trotted out, and nobody liked them. every browser has tried de-emphasizing the URL, and Chrome even tried completely eliminating it.[1] They hate that people can deep link into their platforms and share these links with each other, untracked. They want to have complete control of the experience. They are slowly migrating us to a network of crummy walled gardens. If it was up to them, they would just have you download a giant .exe file and require that you run with admin privileges. The only protections that the likes of Google would offer you is that the different pieces of opaque adware clogging up your device not interfere with each other, and not to so destabilize your device that you can't be advertised to. In other words, Android. And they will use every bit of leverage they have to continue to corral us from the open pastures of the web into their nightmarish silos. A powerful bulwark against this was Mozilla. But their #1 priority now is to validate and amplify Google's vision of the web. Rest assured, now matter how awful and user-hostile webundles turn out to be, Mozilla will be there, offering an inferior implementation. Firefox got popular because they completely rejected Microsoft's vision of the web. They didn't try to implement Microsoft's terrible ideas, because they were user hostile and not worth implementing. [1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2362123/google-chromes-origin-chip-experimental-feature-appears-to-be-on-hold.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2362123/google-chromes-origi... [2]: https://villing.com/articles/facebook-is-the-new-aol/ https://villing.com/articles/facebook-is-the-new-aol/