Oh, is this why the French Wikipedia site looked different for a while? And here I thought the French just wanted to stand out or something.

At least there's a toggle on the bottom right to toggle the fixed content width. Too bad it's just for the current open site and not permanent for all sites.

I don't remember the exact date. The "close other tabs" was fairly recent and they very quickly reverted it. The certificate thing was a while back. I think that was when they redesigned Chrome to the whole big button look (or I guess you could say more touch screen friendly UI).

An option was added back in to display the full URL instead of hiding the protocol or "trivial" subdomains. No more extensions or startup parameters required.

Enable the flag chrome://flags/#omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls and right click the Omnibox to show the context menu with the option to always show the full URL.

I guess we can file that one in the peculiar design choices folder right next to "Move the option to show the website certificate to the developer tools" and "Remove 'close other tabs' option from tab context menu".