Really?
Google's usually pretty good about pushing standards and best practices but this is just lame.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467
From my understanding, if you type in http://www.foo.com in your browser it will now remove the http:// - not that it matters, the browser auto-prepends if it you leave it out, but it's not intuitive at all now, and it's not like it was a change that needed to be done.
This is just going to make more people copy/paste the wrong URLs into pages, not get autolinked properly, etc. How many <a href="www.foo.com/"> type links will there be if this starts spreading... I like being able to copy/paste directly from the address bar.
I don't care if people don't put it in when you type in "yahoo.com" - the issue here is the output and reuse and the general idea of "this is a legitimate URL" - considering the RFC for URLs does maintain that you need a scheme!
"A URL contains the name of the scheme being used (<scheme>) followed by a colon and then a string (the <scheme-specific-part>) whose interpretation depends on the scheme."