To me, combining the search bar into the url/location bar was the step backwards. i'm not a mobile first user, so it just makes no sense to me. there are many times i've wanted to just use the url for quicker navigation with things like pagination and other forms of updating the url to the page I want rather than clicking < or > type buttons. there are plenty of other types of non-hacking url updating directly that the hiding of the url is annoying