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For a long time the New York Times had a javascript thing that would pop up a dictionary reference for anything you double clicked on. As someone who compulsive

For a long time the New York Times had a javascript thing that would pop up a dictionary reference for anything you double clicked on. As someone who compulsively doubleclicks to highlight and unhighlight, it bugged the hell out of me.

TheCapn 14y ago
An IDE that I use at my job does this trying to pull up variable declarations for whatever you've selected (even if its giant blocks of data). I know that feeling.
jfb 14y ago
I used Glimmerblocker to nuke all Javascript from the Times because of this. What is it about newspaper websites that encourages what I can only assume are normally rational developers to misbehave so unbelievably badly?
- sk5t 14y ago
  These terrible, tacky tack-ons have little to no relationship to what the developers would do... unless those same developers are also in charge of partner programs.
  - OriginalSyn 14y ago
    Exactly, I can't count the times I've butted heads with our marketing, design and business development teams over silly, annoying and outright ridiculous features they had charged us with implementing... before we became a more agile shop these confrontations usually resulted in me having to back down and implement the features because they were pretty much set in stone by the time they got into our queue but now we can often compromise since we're involved earlier in the planning stages.
    - davimack 14y ago
      I wouldn't attribute the change to "agile" ... but would attribute the problem to poor design. Subtle difference, but you get the same garbage in agile stuff - just depends on the PM, really.
      - OriginalSyn 14y ago
        No, I don't attribute it to being agile, I attribute it to dev being involved near the start of project planning and having input along the way. It just happened that when the company decided on being an agile shop this happened as well. Sorry that was not clear.
- kamjam 14y ago
  The annoying thing is that these things are often used to stop other developers stealing stuff, like the the disable right click so you can't steal my images. Someone I know has an old website in flash that he had done that way so people steal the images. When I did a print screen and a 5 second edit in Photoshop he was a little shocked. He's get the site rebuilt in HTML now :) If it's on the web, then it's gonna get stolen if someone actually wants it. Don't piss everyone else off in the meanwhile.
scanr 14y ago
The New York Times site was why I installed NoScript for the first time.
andrewla 14y ago
Yes, the New York Times was the worst. In a similar vein, snopes.com also forbids selecting on the page. And when they "fixed" Chrome so that clicking and dragging from within a selection dragged the selection instead of starting a new selection, I died a little inside. Why would I want to drag text on a web page? I guess random clicking and selecting is no more of a useful use case, but I still find myself messing this up.
- Flenser 14y ago
  Why would I want to drag text on a web page I drag selected text to between tabs to create a new tab with a Google search for that text. I do that a lot.
  - tadfisher 14y ago
    Do you know about the "Search Google for '%query%'" in the right-click menu?
    - kennae 14y ago
      Thanks for pointing that out (not sarcasm).
    - Flenser 14y ago
      Did not (also not sarcasm), thanks.
  - rocky1138 14y ago
    Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know it was an option.
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    I also do that. Once in a while you get text with a colon in it, which Chrome interprets as a protocol handler and goes to about:blank. 1 in a thousand but it still gets me often. Here is a test. drag: thistext And yes, I've reported this bug.
superkinz 14y ago
Totally agree, super annoying. I will highlight and re-highlight a paragraph over and over as I read through it. I'm not sure why I do it, maybe it's my impulse to go faster that I can satisfy by moving my cursor rather than reading more rapidly.
nsoldiac 14y ago
Quora does a similar thing, it's beyond annoying for a fellow compulsive text-selector.
monk_e_boy 14y ago
I'm a programmer and in one of my first jobs the sales guy (who was a nice bloke) double clicked on everything all the time. This made me think about how he demo'd our windows app, I had to also test double, tripple clicks, double click + drag etc. So I added a feature that on the 'About this product' page added the clicks and double clicks. When it reached over 100 I displayed an animated bunch of flowers. Many months later I get a phone call from the sales guy, "Hey, monk.e.boy, I'm rehursing a demo and some flowers are showing." I was like, Jeeeesus, 100 double clicks on the most obscure page of our app?! WTF are you doing!

TheCapn 14y ago

An IDE that I use at my job does this trying to pull up variable declarations for whatever you've selected (even if its giant blocks of data). I know that feeling.

jfb 14y ago

I used Glimmerblocker to nuke all Javascript from the Times because of this. What is it about newspaper websites that encourages what I can only assume are normally rational developers to misbehave so unbelievably badly?

sk5t 14y ago
These terrible, tacky tack-ons have little to no relationship to what the developers would do... unless those same developers are also in charge of partner programs.
- OriginalSyn 14y ago
  Exactly, I can't count the times I've butted heads with our marketing, design and business development teams over silly, annoying and outright ridiculous features they had charged us with implementing... before we became a more agile shop these confrontations usually resulted in me having to back down and implement the features because they were pretty much set in stone by the time they got into our queue but now we can often compromise since we're involved earlier in the planning stages.
  - davimack 14y ago
    I wouldn't attribute the change to "agile" ... but would attribute the problem to poor design. Subtle difference, but you get the same garbage in agile stuff - just depends on the PM, really.
    - OriginalSyn 14y ago
      No, I don't attribute it to being agile, I attribute it to dev being involved near the start of project planning and having input along the way. It just happened that when the company decided on being an agile shop this happened as well. Sorry that was not clear.
kamjam 14y ago
The annoying thing is that these things are often used to stop other developers stealing stuff, like the the disable right click so you can't steal my images. Someone I know has an old website in flash that he had done that way so people steal the images. When I did a print screen and a 5 second edit in Photoshop he was a little shocked. He's get the site rebuilt in HTML now :) If it's on the web, then it's gonna get stolen if someone actually wants it. Don't piss everyone else off in the meanwhile.

scanr 14y ago

The New York Times site was why I installed NoScript for the first time.

andrewla 14y ago

Yes, the New York Times was the worst. In a similar vein, snopes.com also forbids selecting on the page. And when they "fixed" Chrome so that clicking and dragging from within a selection dragged the selection instead of starting a new selection, I died a little inside. Why would I want to drag text on a web page? I guess random clicking and selecting is no more of a useful use case, but I still find myself messing this up.

Flenser 14y ago
Why would I want to drag text on a web page I drag selected text to between tabs to create a new tab with a Google search for that text. I do that a lot.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  Do you know about the "Search Google for '%query%'" in the right-click menu?
  - kennae 14y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out (not sarcasm).
  - Flenser 14y ago
    Did not (also not sarcasm), thanks.
- rocky1138 14y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know it was an option.
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  I also do that. Once in a while you get text with a colon in it, which Chrome interprets as a protocol handler and goes to about:blank. 1 in a thousand but it still gets me often. Here is a test. drag: thistext And yes, I've reported this bug.

superkinz 14y ago

Totally agree, super annoying. I will highlight and re-highlight a paragraph over and over as I read through it. I'm not sure why I do it, maybe it's my impulse to go faster that I can satisfy by moving my cursor rather than reading more rapidly.

nsoldiac 14y ago

Quora does a similar thing, it's beyond annoying for a fellow compulsive text-selector.

monk_e_boy 14y ago

I'm a programmer and in one of my first jobs the sales guy (who was a nice bloke) double clicked on everything all the time. This made me think about how he demo'd our windows app, I had to also test double, tripple clicks, double click + drag etc. So I added a feature that on the 'About this product' page added the clicks and double clicks. When it reached over 100 I displayed an animated bunch of flowers. Many months later I get a phone call from the sales guy, "Hey, monk.e.boy, I'm rehursing a demo and some flowers are showing." I was like, Jeeeesus, 100 double clicks on the most obscure page of our app?! WTF are you doing!