Besides the fact that this article is a clickbait, "killing URLs" is a actually something that is happening. I'm surprised nobody put this in relation with the fact that google has a search engine, something much more important to this topic than the fact that it has a web browser. Hiding URLs and making them 2nd class citizen means nothing alone. The reason it is done is to promote an alternative way of accessing/finding things, with the goal of controlling how people move/navigate (since this is directly translatable to ad-money and behavioral data collection). Just think about every single ad-based (eg lock-in based) social network/service/web-app: they want you to navigate through their searchbox and result page, because they want to control what you see and keep you from going away.

So killing URLs isn't much about this particular action from google or about web-browsers, it's actually embodied by the much broader trend towards searchbox-centered ui and "related stuff"-based navigation (instead of an absolute classification system like trees, tag hierarchies etc). Please f*ck off with your search engines and recommendation systems, just give me some tools to build taxonomies so i can organize myself. I know what i want and i know how i want it classified. IT was meant to organize (and process) databases please just stick to that, i want a library not a bookshop.