Imagine a world without search engines and omni bars. This newfangled world wide web thing comes along and looks like it might become popular, but it's totally new to most people, who happen to be 99% of your customers. If they type `cnn` in the bar, chances are they want to go to cnn.com, so you make it so and don't lose most of your market share.

Besides as far as painfully, frustratingly obvious security implications are concerned you have done much worse before for less end-user benefit like making your main word processing application the world's premier networked virus delivery platform.

> so you make it so and don't lose most of your market share.

lose it to whom though? other software that also doesn't behave the same way?

And, per earlier comments, this wasn't a browser thing - this is a lower level windows hostname resolver issue.

.dev is making a lot of money for example , it is not easy to argue that they/google lose money because others didn’t read the spec.

This is the doing of a company that gave us Internet Explorer 6 & Office Macros.

Microsoft prioritized user experience over security for the longest time of their existence and I think they had a little bit of success with it :)