"No one has any intention of diminishing usability or making it hard manipulate URLS" Except that's exactly what's being done here. You mean that no one is twi

"No one has any intention of diminishing usability or making it hard manipulate URLS" Except that's exactly what's being done here. You mean that no one is twirling their moustache saying "muahahaha, soon we will make search the only way to navigate the web!" like a bond villain. Of course not, that's stupid. That's not how things happen. People are concerned that the intention is to make changes to chrome that value the primacy and visibility of URLs fairly low compared to other factors. Everyone involved is well meaning (especially with the "won't somebody please think of the elderly!"-ness of the anti-phishing agenda), they just have an unavoidable institutional bias. It's not a coincidence that these all make the google search bar more prominent. That's valued very highly. If your criteria value X relatively lowly and you evaluate a bunch of things which are judged with those criteria you end up diminishing X. No one cares that you didn't "intend" to do it, they care that you are doing it.