The old version opened with the text fully selected. You could either type a query and overwrite the text, edit the url, or tap and hold to get... Low and behold, copy and share.

The only thing they have added is confusion and behavorial conditioning. I see no benefits of the "new" way.

So what you are saying is the most common actions, copy and share, were behind a confusing an easy to mess up long press gesture.

A whole lot of people in this thread have never watched a normal person use a smartphone in a UX study.

I'm saying it operates as mobile users have learnt to use over the past decade (and how the rest of the OS UI works).

Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction.

None of this UX design is perfect or totally settled, especially since it's only been 10 years since it's been mainstream.

> Long press, especially on selected text, has always been a subpar user interaction.

Exactly, and other than web pages (before this UX change), virtually every other well-defined piece of content that is likely to be shared had a prominent, distinct, easy-access share button on mobile (the separate copy to clipboard button added for URLs is not a common affordance; in most cases that functionality is one of many options accessed through the sharing function. OTOH, for URLs and certain other shared content, copying-and-paste is a particularly common sharing method, so promoting it to a first-class option further streamlines a common use case. ) This change actually better aligns the browser with every other way of interacting with shareable content on mobile rather than violating mobile UX expectations.

Long press is fine, it's the autoselection of words that messes me up (on Android).

I click the url bar in Chrome, then the whole url shows up selected. Then I long-press to copy the url, but no! It auto-selects only a single word in the url and brings up the option to copy just that single word. Stupid.

Yes I know that I can click on the lock icon and then on the url, and that's what I usually end up doing, but that is also stupid.

Edit: sometimes it seems to bring the original url down in a dropdown with share/copy/edit buttons, but that doesn't seem to happen all the time. I haven't worked out why the dropdown often doesn't activate.

There are enough new active daily users on mobile devices for the UX that users have learned over the past decade to be less relevant than whether an average user is confused.

If they wanted to make copy/share/whatever else easier, they could've just made those buttons appear with the first tap, but also not change the immediate editability of the selected text like it was before. That's why all those other comments here about how they made copy and share easier are beside the point --- it's definitely possible to do that without making editing harder. Sadly it seems the skill of adding new functionality and making things easier without breaking existing functionality and making things harder is not common these days... but that's really what I think people making changes should focus on and deeply consider.