If a "cite_ref-n" is within a paragraph, it is no longer possible to triple-click to select the entire paragraph,
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Quiddity_%28WMF%29/sandbox&oldid=675182156
(possibly the change came from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/226053/ ?)
Tested in Firefox 3.6 (2012) which exhibits new behavior. So not a browser bug. I'd suggest using the Wayback machine to pin point it, but somebody's been serving the bot the mobile version.
No, it's clearly a change on our side (from the patch Quiddity linked), I just believe the behavior exhibited by Firefox to be wrong. All other browsers I tested (Chrome, IE 11, Opera 12) still allow the paragraph to be selected with triple- or quadruple-click.
Opera 12 exhibits the new behavior if I quadruple-click after the second reference. As a screen reader user the selection and copy behaviors of the browser and web page are very important to me.
After this change Firefox now also sometimes breaks a line between punctuation and reference, which didn't happen before.
Change 233483 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński):
Revert "Use display: inline-block instead of unicode-bidi"
Change 233483 merged by jenkins-bot:
Revert "Use display: inline-block instead of unicode-bidi"
The fix will roll out to Wikimedia wikis over the course of this week, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.26/Roadmap for details.
Change 233845 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ori.livneh):
Revert "Use display: inline-block instead of unicode-bidi"
Change 233845 merged by jenkins-bot:
Revert "Use display: inline-block instead of unicode-bidi"