Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things,

Perhaps this is a difference in incentives? Chrome was explicitly owned and developed by Google, a search engine. Google makes money when you search for things, rather than using the address bar, so they're incentivized to reward this behavior. (I've always suspected this is why Chrome's history search is 10 times worse than Firefox's, but that's another story).