Super awkward text selection in Safari

[printz]

It seems like trying to select something in Safari has become an insurmountable obstacle. When I hold a word, I expect that word to be selected, the selection to be extensible left and right, and a callout menu to appear with clipboard and dictionary commands. But now quite often it results in a box which can't even be resized despite having handles, it can disappear instantly, and how do I turn it into a simple text selection? I can't access the dictionary by selecting a single word this way!

Better yet, is there any way to disable this silly box selection? I expect a 'no', because only the critical settings are editable on iOS Safari.

I think it works well here, but I had much more trouble selecting text on sites like TVTropes etc.

Edit: this applies to iPad as well. In fact my only iOS device is an iPad. Sorry if thread is misplaced.

 

[MasterRyu2011]

If you're talking about the big blue box with circle points as handles, they can surely be resized---it's just hard to do it on a small screen. This is where Chrome is superior to Safari. Chrome selects the individual word every time and the handles are larger and easier to handle.