It's funny how this expectation had changed over time. In early browsers like Mosaic and Netscape, the expectation was that you'd enter a domain name or full UR

It's funny how this expectation had changed over time. In early browsers like Mosaic and Netscape, the expectation was that you'd enter a domain name or full URL and there would be a DNS query. When newer browsers incorporated search into the address bar, many of us considered this to be leaking information to search providers. For quite a while I disabled that feature.