Most normal users don't understand what URLs are, so I don't think this is a bad thing. This actually makes the UI more consistent; the address bar is always a way to search or go to a URL.
An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.
A big part of that is probably how easy it is to take a screenshot and send it to someone. If that whole process is faster and easier than me figuring out how to find a link inside this tweet which I can then send to someone, I'm going to just go the screenshot route.
> Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.
That's quite convoluted, and makes people look retarded :P
That just goes to show that URLs are a layer of indirection that people just don't get. Screenshots/photos are easy: Im seeing something, if I send this, they see the same thing.
An anecdote: my friends girlfriend was reading an article on mobile safari and wanted my friend to read it. Instead of sharing the URL, she actually took screenshots and messaged it to him! We both found this fascinating! I keep seeing this sort of behaviour on Twitter and Facebook where people share screenshots of tweets and posts instead of the URLs.