“Why do you need OSes” is something I would expect from someone who does not know how a computer works.
Whilst they should probably be tweaked, address bars are central to the web as it is currently.
Google should stay as far as possible from me and has no business telling me it approves of the sites I am browsing.
I did not downvote the post, but there is no sentence in it that does not make me regret having read it.
And all of these opinions are obviously not held by the poster but are rather what the poster believes Google wants.
My experience is that as much as some geeks love to go on about web apps, real people still do more than browse the web on their computers.
What these big companies are trying to do is very clear. They don't want these fools to know much about web. If these people suddenly starts learning about how web works, that'd be a disaster (for Them).
Now, the address bar is just a distraction to them, nothing else. Now, if Google is removing them, let them. If the address bar is hidden, then there's less clutter. So, they'll think that it's better. (You and me know that isn't any better for us. I'd be really angry if they completely remove it.)
> Why are you referring to those big companies as 'Them'?
< You don't know yet?
The reason why the address bar is being tweaked in this manner isn't to hide the Internet from Internet users, it's to hide insecure parts of the URL. Only the domain name portion of a URL is actually secured by anything, and only the part closest to the right of the domain. Most people don't know or care that they need to run a set of regular expressions in their head and consult with a list of public suffixes to validate if a website is legitimate. They're just told, "Look for microsoft.com in the URL", and then they see http://123.45.67.89/~spam/microsoft.com/techsupport and think "Well, it says Microsoft, that means it's Microsoft".
It's not so much that Google doesn't want people knowing about the web, it's that people already don't know much about the web. It's not the people's job to know all of the relevant technical standards when they just want to know if a security alert in their e-mail is an actual thing they have to worry about or a phishing scam.