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To select text in Mobile Safari you have to tap and hold, not double tap. WebKit views are only place in iOS where this is inconsistent.

I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.

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I was referring to sites that find a way to disable tap and hold text selection, intentionally or not.

Interesting. I haven't encountered this problem.

I joined a team working on a single page app that disabled text selection (via CSS user-select:none) to give it more of an "app" feel. While I understood disabling text selection on certain things, the "disable everything" approach drove me nuts.

When we had a redesign of our app, I decided that was one rule that could be left out (and only applied where needed).

I think it has more to do with apps which have some touch-tracking in place, perhaps for creating a heat map. Try copying text from a twitter post on the mobile web app or Facebook mobile web app..

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