I'm going to be a cinic: if the Chrome team sees that users use Omnibox/Google more to got to the desired URL, that would be a positive thing (for them). Why type the URL when you can go via uncle Google?
I can actually imagine a lot of users liking that - many people I've seen using a browser will just type stuff in to Google's homepage search box and then follow links. The classic example, yes I've seen it, is people typing Hotmail/Live/Outlook in to Google and then following the link rather than typing in the address [my 8yo did this recently for another site].
For many-many users the web entry point is the search engine they use as their homepage, that is "the internet" for them. This was the paradigm that AOL developed and there are vast swathes of users that cut their teeth on AOL.
I think that's an ok thing. I used to scoff at this sort of behavior but no longer - users who do this are just doing the same thing I do in the address bar, except they're taking up a whole page and an extra click. The address bar is probably too ephemeral and hard to understand.
It's probably a good hint that browsers could find success at imitating a similar search interface in the new page/new tab UI. Offer a clean page with a text search field, with very fast results that have good context.
Chrome and FF have a "View History" page with search, but it seems to be fixed by date and with no way to sort for relevance. IE doesn't appear to have a history search (I think this is baked into Windows search instead?).
The cynical view is they want people to share using Google+ instead of just sending a URL. The "Share" button is already central to most browsers, but is still uncommon on the desktop.
It kinda depends on the Chrome team's goals and whether those are absolute / which ones take precedence; I'd say in this case it's a compromise between usability / user-friendliness / not chasing away their users, and subtly increasing usage of google's search services.
Google has avoided being obvious about Chrome giving them more revenue up until now, as far as I'm concerned. Whether this will also swing in their favor or not, I can't be sure at the moment.
And with Safari on iOS 7 only showing the domain name, there is some precedence with the approach described in the article.
Except given the recent trend, too many decisions like that would likely result in LibreAlloy or something similar. They have a lot more breathing room to behave that way with gmail and Youtube and similar, where the value they are providing is in serving the content, as opposed to Chrome where the code is more or less available and their value is in developing the open source environment.
Clarification: I'm not sold on the "Upstream goes sour? Time to Libre$thing" trend as a good thing in the long term, but I doubt the potential for it to occur has escaped Google's notice.
It would actually be much easier than with most products, since this is just a change in the UI. You could fork Chromium while still keeping Blink upstream, and build whatever UI you want (somewhat similar to what Opera is doing).
I'm curious as well, specifically how would you go about tailoring those metrics to different features as they're released. Seems like that could be a pretty awesome/multi-faceted question to see the raw data behind.
That said, I sincerely hope that this particular anti-pattern's efficacy in converting people from typing in URL's to searching for websites isn't the most important metric.
