Safari Text Annoyance

One of the nice things about Safari has been that it apparently uses the same text engine as TextEdit (or did), wherein a string of text can be selected easily by double-clicking the first word, then pressing <shift> and clicking anywhere in the last word in the string; the last word is selected in entirety and the string can be copied. In other programs, e.g. Pages, one must precisely click on the last letter in the last word to get the whole word, which is an annoying hassle for one accustomed to the ease of working with text in TextEdit.

Now suddenly I find that Safari v.11.1 (latest) in a fresh install of 10.12.6 Sierra on a brand new MacBook Pro has reverted to the bad old system: to copy a string of text I must carefully capture the very last letter rather than simply clicking anywhere in the last word. Which, again, is an annoyance, after years of doing it the easy way, as I copy a lot of stuff off Web pages.

I've tried reinstalling Safari 11.1, but it didn't help. I checked Chrome; it works the easy way, as do Brave and Vivaldi; Firefox does it the hard way.

However, Safari 11.1 with 10.11.6 El Capitan (on my MacBook) selects text the easy way. Strange.

Anybody have any idea why this function has changed, and/or what I can do to get it back?