I don't think this is new, but it's extremely annoying that you can't open the contextual menu after selecting some text in Google Reader. The alternative is to use the menu key or to press Shift+F10.

I also noticed this and have been using that workaround too. It's definitely only been like this for a few weeks, perhaps introduced when they made these changes:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/03/one-more-step.html

Does this happen in different browsers? Does this also happen when you disallow pages to hide the browser context menu?

IE6 allows you to right-click a selection. So does Opera and Safari (PC).

And I'm currently not allowing Firefox to hide the browser context menu.

That means the bug is Firefox-only.

I'm using FireFox and can still get the context menu

You get the page's menu, not the selection's menu.

I have firefox 2.0.0.12, when I select text from an item, a right click shows me the contextual menu (copy, select all, search on google, ...). I don't see where the problem is.