I had strong objections to this behavior the last three times Mozilla and Google did it.

URI schemes and subdomains and never "trivial". Neo-Luddism is not a good look on technology company.

If you want, Google, go ahead and spin-off 'Chrome: Baby's First Browser'. I'm sure it will be heavily exploited and contribute in part to the technical illiteracy of new generations.

I really wonder if these "simplifications" are actually engineered to keep users in the dark as to how things work so that they are left dependent on third parties to continue delivering addictive magic.

How about a browser with no address bar? Just two buttons, "sexy time" and "pew pew". That'd be pretty clean.