Something that doesn't seem to be directly addressed here is the data-leaking nature of this thing. I don't know what a typical user of Chromium expects to hap

Something that doesn't seem to be directly addressed here is the data-leaking nature of this thing. I don't know what a typical user of Chromium expects to happen when they type arbitrary strings into the Omnibox, but I can tell you that they probably don't expect the full text to be forwarded to several random, centralized, and highly popular DNS servers that are neither under the control of Google nor their ISPs nor their employers/institutions. This may have the effect of logging all sorts of stuff that normally Google would be hoovering up, but instead it's in the hands of third parties. Extremely trustworthy parties indeed, but they are also high-value high-stakes targets for anyone who'd want to steal valuable data in the form of query logs. Obviously there's no good solution to this. I believe Firefox led the charge with the "Awesome Bar" or whatever it was first called, which habituated me and millions of users to type search queries directly into the URL bar. It's one of those features that's so amazingly useful that it really forces the giants to carefully calculate the tradeoff costs, such as the one discussed in TFA.