I think we’ve had a big misunderstanding here, partly because I got annoyed for you calling something others use as pointless.

I’m not trying to argue that NOTHING other than text selection should be possible. That would be annoying. From my very first comment is said people highlight to copy text. The very first one. Just that this incidental “feature” of temporarily highlighting text is clearly a useful one. People DO want to just select the text sometimes. But also copy, search, whatever.

Just because you don’t use text selection this way, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. (The reason I got annoyed at you calling it “pointless”, though, I see now this is because of a misunderstanding)

Hell, I do it not only for myself, but when sharing my screen at work, and pointing out specific pieces of text. Makes it very easy to quickly bring my colleagues eyes to the specific spot I’m talking about in the text.

You can’t name a single OS now or in history where pure selection is possible yet no operations on the selection are available

This isn’t what I’m arguing. Non-copyable text is a great sin. But there are plenty of programs that don’t offer a pop-up, off the top of my head: Bluebeam Revu, Notepad++, many web browsers (but as mentioned, not Edge who’s implementation of popup options sucks and gets in the way), the list goes on.

I am not against all popups, just the ones that prevent you from reading the text you just highlighted.

This isn’t even just an accessibility thing, getting in the way of the text you highlighted is just annoying.