That's a really great point, thank you. My only possible objection is to observe that clearly some things are important/necessary to teach, others aren't, and

That's a really great point, thank you. My only possible objection is to observe that clearly some things are important/necessary to teach, others aren't, and all we're arguing about is which of these URL's fall into. Nobody here is (currently) arguing against such basic things as login's and passwords, or that "foo@example.com" should obviously to everyone be an email. The reason I think URL's are over the line is because everything after the domain name is usually an implementation detail. Some sites will have "id=234234234", some sites will have complicated paths, some sites will have nice, readable URL's, and a large part of the difference is the specific framework or approach that the Web Devs decided to use. Do you really think it's important for people to understand the decisions behind this? That's over the line IMO. Also, another knock against URL's being required is that, de facto, people don't understand URL's and seem to use the web just fine. That's because us selfless developers have been working hard to abstract away the issue from users. I think most users don't understand URL's, and this doesn't bother them in the least until you get to issues like phishing attacks. So all Chrome would be doing is recognizing an existing situation, and helping make it better. Lastly, I'd like to point out that even the easy examples you mention, e.g. passwords, are something that most users don't really understand, and for exactly that reason, developers have been trying to get rid of passwords for many years. And IMO, one of the big benefits of Facebook is that it makes the "send a message to someone" game much easier than email for real users, so that's a knock against email. I really don't think that understanding URL's is akin to being basically literate. I think the bar is much lower, and that we as developers forget just how much specialized knowledge we already know, and how much the average user already has in order to use a computer these days. That said, it's a great analogy so thanks for bringing it up!