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.