7 ms·

Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Jap

Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Japanese text especially annoying.

zeroimpl 6y ago
It also prevents the dictionary lookup gesture of macOS from working in Firefox, since it selects the whole sentence and looks that up (which fails).
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Side note, this already doesn't work if you don't have a Touchpad / Magic mouse. The normal workflow is Right Click ==> Look Up, but Firefox overrides macOS's normal right click menu. :( Firfox is just not a very good macOS citizen, sadly.
  - spacehunt 6y ago
    You can still select the text and choose Look Up from the Services menu.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Oh, there is that, but it's too far away to be useful. If I could set up a custom keyboard shortcut for the service, it would work great—but support for custom keyboard shortcuts also doesn't work in macOS Firefox[1]! (Unless you set a combination which Firefox doesn't already use for something, and it already uses everything sensible, so you have to set something long and annoying.) [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333781 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333781
knolax 6y ago
Personally I find double click highlighting to be a useless feature in any language, but the Firefox approach is superior imo. Breaking at script boundaries is predictable behavior the user can anticipate whereas doing some janky ad hoc natural language processing invariably results in behavior that is essentially random from a user perspective. I tried out double click highlighting on some basic Japanese sentences on Chromium and it failed to highlight any of what would be considered words. It's not like English highlighting does complex grammatical analysis to make sure "Project Manager" gets highlighted as one chunk and "eventUpdate" gets highlighted as two chunks, most implementations just breaks at spaces like the user expects.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I feel like this is a conclusion you could only reach by having an irrational compulsion to defend the deficiencies of Firefox, and not being a regular user of the Japanese language.
  - knolax 6y ago
    I don't even use Firefox. You know what's really irrational? Trying to find ulterior motive in an argument instead of addressing its substance.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I don't use/speak Japanese, but the GP's conclusion makes complete sense to me. Consistent behavior > inconsistent behavior, almost always. If I can anticipate what my computer is going to do, I can plan around it, even if it means a bit of extra manual work.
    - BigJono 6y ago
      That doesn't work if the consistent behaviour is completely useless. If double click selected English tokens grouped by which half of the alphabet they came from, nobody would ever double click anything, they'd just click-drag highlight.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Are spaces completely meaningless in Japanese? I was under the impression they separated phrases.
        microcolonel 6y ago
        Spaces have zero importance to the Japanese language itself, but they are occasionally used like punctuation. e.g. some YouTube video titles will use spaces around names of things that could be hard to parse as not part of a sentence, another example is when you're typesetting phrases in lyrics. In general, whitespace characters have no place or significance inside a Japanese sentence, and most of the whitespace in Japanese typesetting is built into punctuation marks. Furthermore, even most punctuation is optional in Japanese. The full stop 。 and comma 、 are mostly a matter of preference, sometimes spaces are used in place of full stops or commas.
jack1243star 6y ago
I actually like this behavior more, since it is predictable. Sometimes it just works for occasional looking up proper nouns, and you can already tell if it won't.
- trnglina 6y ago
  I think it depends on how engrained the double-click highlight is for you. For me, I double-click by default, since I almost always want to select at a word boundary in English. As a result, when I need to select Chinese or Japanese text, I'm always annoyed when my double click (which, in my mind, should always select a word) selects a nonsensical sub-sentence instead, and I have to then re-select it manually.
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    When you double-click, say, the word "double-click", do you expect to highlight either "double" or "click", depending on which part of the word I happened to click on? Or do you expect to highlight the entire compound? Does your expectation change when the phrase is written with spacing: "double click"? When written without spacing: "doubleclick"? Does your perception of the word boundaries change between these cases? Now consider another anglophone arbitrarily; how likely does it seem to you that they would share the exact same set of expectations of the above with you? Because if they don't, then one of you is going to have their expectations violated. Now give it a try: do the highlights match your expectations? (Moreover: are those expectations consistent with where you placed the word boundaries?) If your expectations of what double-click highlight does for English is consistent with what actually happens when you double-click, it is deeply unlikely that the causality goes word boundary -> highlight expectation; if they do, it's more likely that double-click highlight has influenced your sense of word boundaries. But it's even more likely that you your expectations of double-click highlight don't actually match up with your intuition for word boundaries, and you just have a pretty good model of how double-click highlight behaves independently of where you think the word boundaries are. (The notion of word boundaries in this context is fraught anyway. Even setting aside the problem of compound words, the phonological word boundaries of Japanese don't match up with the lexicographical ones, in both directions.)

Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Japanese text especially annoying.

zeroimpl 6y ago

It also prevents the dictionary lookup gesture of macOS from working in Firefox, since it selects the whole sentence and looks that up (which fails).

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Side note, this already doesn't work if you don't have a Touchpad / Magic mouse. The normal workflow is Right Click ==> Look Up, but Firefox overrides macOS's normal right click menu. :( Firfox is just not a very good macOS citizen, sadly.
- spacehunt 6y ago
  You can still select the text and choose Look Up from the Services menu.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Oh, there is that, but it's too far away to be useful. If I could set up a custom keyboard shortcut for the service, it would work great—but support for custom keyboard shortcuts also doesn't work in macOS Firefox[1]! (Unless you set a combination which Firefox doesn't already use for something, and it already uses everything sensible, so you have to set something long and annoying.) [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333781 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333781

knolax 6y ago

Personally I find double click highlighting to be a useless feature in any language, but the Firefox approach is superior imo. Breaking at script boundaries is predictable behavior the user can anticipate whereas doing some janky ad hoc natural language processing invariably results in behavior that is essentially random from a user perspective. I tried out double click highlighting on some basic Japanese sentences on Chromium and it failed to highlight any of what would be considered words. It's not like English highlighting does complex grammatical analysis to make sure "Project Manager" gets highlighted as one chunk and "eventUpdate" gets highlighted as two chunks, most implementations just breaks at spaces like the user expects.

microcolonel 6y ago
I feel like this is a conclusion you could only reach by having an irrational compulsion to defend the deficiencies of Firefox, and not being a regular user of the Japanese language.
- knolax 6y ago
  I don't even use Firefox. You know what's really irrational? Trying to find ulterior motive in an argument instead of addressing its substance.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I don't use/speak Japanese, but the GP's conclusion makes complete sense to me. Consistent behavior > inconsistent behavior, almost always. If I can anticipate what my computer is going to do, I can plan around it, even if it means a bit of extra manual work.
  - BigJono 6y ago
    That doesn't work if the consistent behaviour is completely useless. If double click selected English tokens grouped by which half of the alphabet they came from, nobody would ever double click anything, they'd just click-drag highlight.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Are spaces completely meaningless in Japanese? I was under the impression they separated phrases.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        Spaces have zero importance to the Japanese language itself, but they are occasionally used like punctuation. e.g. some YouTube video titles will use spaces around names of things that could be hard to parse as not part of a sentence, another example is when you're typesetting phrases in lyrics. In general, whitespace characters have no place or significance inside a Japanese sentence, and most of the whitespace in Japanese typesetting is built into punctuation marks. Furthermore, even most punctuation is optional in Japanese. The full stop 。 and comma 、 are mostly a matter of preference, sometimes spaces are used in place of full stops or commas.

jack1243star 6y ago

I actually like this behavior more, since it is predictable. Sometimes it just works for occasional looking up proper nouns, and you can already tell if it won't.

trnglina 6y ago
I think it depends on how engrained the double-click highlight is for you. For me, I double-click by default, since I almost always want to select at a word boundary in English. As a result, when I need to select Chinese or Japanese text, I'm always annoyed when my double click (which, in my mind, should always select a word) selects a nonsensical sub-sentence instead, and I have to then re-select it manually.
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  When you double-click, say, the word "double-click", do you expect to highlight either "double" or "click", depending on which part of the word I happened to click on? Or do you expect to highlight the entire compound? Does your expectation change when the phrase is written with spacing: "double click"? When written without spacing: "doubleclick"? Does your perception of the word boundaries change between these cases? Now consider another anglophone arbitrarily; how likely does it seem to you that they would share the exact same set of expectations of the above with you? Because if they don't, then one of you is going to have their expectations violated. Now give it a try: do the highlights match your expectations? (Moreover: are those expectations consistent with where you placed the word boundaries?) If your expectations of what double-click highlight does for English is consistent with what actually happens when you double-click, it is deeply unlikely that the causality goes word boundary -> highlight expectation; if they do, it's more likely that double-click highlight has influenced your sense of word boundaries. But it's even more likely that you your expectations of double-click highlight don't actually match up with your intuition for word boundaries, and you just have a pretty good model of how double-click highlight behaves independently of where you think the word boundaries are. (The notion of word boundaries in this context is fraught anyway. Even setting aside the problem of compound words, the phonological word boundaries of Japanese don't match up with the lexicographical ones, in both directions.)