[ninkendo]

I said I was 99% sure it used to work that way.

But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari.

That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not.

So it’s not that they changed something, it’s that the behavior is different for editable vs noneditable text, and my brain keeps doing the wrong one. Maybe now that I know about double tapping my brain can finally have a complete picture of the behavior split and I can stop fucking it up each time.

(Although I’m still pretty certain that doing a brief long press, but not long enough for the magnifying glass to show up, used to select a word of text. I can’t prove this though. Maybe I’m remembering the Force Touch days when you used to be able to do a Force Touch while long pressing to expand selection. That would make sense with the timeline.)

[eviks]

hm, here is the original iphone user guide for ios 3.1

> When you’re typing, you canalso double-tap to select a word. In read-only documents, such as webpages, or email or text messages you’ve received, touch and hold to select a word.

Also, double tapping selects by words in editable notes vs by letter in read-only, so the OS will continue to fight you feeble attempts at trying to have a consistent experience!

[int_19h]

I also remember the same thing as GP, and I believe I got it from the very first iPad.