According to an aggrieved poster on Slashdot, users are overwhelmingly asking Google to move the Chrome tab collection underneath the address / URL edit box. As far as I am concerned, all that that proves is that those users are stupid, and Google is right to ignore them. The URL is a property of the page that the user is on, and as such, the control that surfaces it should be inside the page. If you consider that tabs are a part of the page metaphor, then what is below the tab is part of the page, while what is above the tab is not.
All these supposed users are doing then, is asking Google to move away from a placement that makes sense in the context of the page metaphor to one that doesn't. Instead of being part of the page, the address bar would become some kind of shared area updated whenever the user changes tabs. I don't see that as an improvement.
[And note that since we are talking about consistency with a metaphor, it's actually irrelevant whether the tab bar is in fact implemented as a shared resource or not, i.e. whether there is only one of them or one per tab.]
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