TLDR - Looking for a way to make Safari treat host/path as a URL instead of a search query.

Details: With the conflagration of address bar and search bar certain expected behaviors have ceased to work, in my case if my computer has a search domain and/or hosts defined in /etc/hosts using just the hostname should be possible however in Safari unless the string entered in the address bar ends in a / it will always be treated as a search query.

Though I would argue that this behavior breaks several standards (1) all major browsers are currently guilty of this but:

• On Firefox (2) there are several hidden settings that allow to either set certain words to always be treated as hostnames (and thus hostname/path as a URL) or even a setting to enable single word hostnames.
• On Chrome after the first time you explicitly browse to any instance of hostname/ all subsequent visits to that hostname and any path (even those never visited) will be treated as a URL.

On Safari however even visiting a hostname/path that already was visited in the past will still be treated as a search query unless a / is appended or http(s):// is prepended, this is pretty frustrating to put it mildly, it also makes creating something like golinks that will work on Safari that much more difficult.

So I'm looking for settings similar to Firefox to bypass/neutralize this behavior.

(1) As to how URIs (should) work, I would argue that if the string in the address bar contains a / an attempt should be made to resolve the substring before the / and if it resolves the string should be treated as a URL, if not by all means search.

(2) On FF I filed the following bug - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1754546

TLDR - Looking for a way to make Safari treat host/path as a URL instead of a search query.

Details: 
With the conflagration of the address bar and search bar certain expected behaviors have ceased to work, in my case, if my computer has a search domain and/or hosts defined in /etc/hosts using just the hostname should be possible however in Safari unless the string entered in the address bar ends in a / it will always be treated as a search query.

Though I would argue that this behavior breaks several standards¹ all major browsers are currently guilty of this but:

• On Firefox² there are several hidden settings that allow to either set certain words to always be treated as hostnames (and thus hostname/path as a URL) or even a setting to enable single word hostnames.
• On Chrome after the first time you explicitly browse to any instance of hostname/ all subsequent visits to that hostname and any path (even those never visited) will be treated as a URL.

On Safari however even visiting a hostname/path that already was visited in the past will still be treated as a search query unless a / is appended or http(s):// is prepended, this is pretty frustrating, to put it mildly, it also makes creating something like golinks that will work on Safari that much more difficult.

So I'm looking for settings similar to Firefox to bypass/neutralize this behavior.

^{1 As to how URIs (should) work, I would argue that if the string in the address bar contains a / an attempt should be made to resolve the substring before the / and if it resolves the string should be treated as a URL, if not by all means search.}

^{2 On FF I filed the following bug - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1754546}