I can’t remember if it was actually shown or just argued for, but the simplification of the URL in the address bar actually helps identify phishing sites, as there is a lot less text to process through, and that one character that might have been changes becomes more visible than before :)

For the "easier to read" part I would prefer Chrome's black vs grey url string.

But for phishing .. with all the tricks possible with Unicode lookalikes, I wonder if people are still doing easily visible character exchanges? qoogle instead of google?