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Also please stop using light colored text on light colored backgrounds, it’s a stupid idea. Thanks for your attention.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue. Assuming you’re on a computer. If you’re not, good luck. Selecting text on phones and tables can be impossible in too many circumstances.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue.
But I’m not actually looking to select the text when I do this, I’m just stimming and the extra visual noise is annoying.
I don’t think I understand the issue then.
I’m complaining about pop-up widgets appearing when you select text, like the email icon here:
Edge is the absolute worst for this. Infuriating
TL;DR: OP could try using your finger on your phone to keep your place?
Oh boy. I design UI (games, not software) and OP’s very specific need would stomp on a very common need for why people select text… which is to copy/paste.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
The complaint is specifically about desktop text selection though, the screenshot above says “i select text using my mouse”. I agree that removing the pop-up UI from mobile would suck, well suck more than mobile text selection already does.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
You’re right, putting
#.quote-share-buttonsin my uBlock filter list got rid of it. Still, blocking all these elements myself is really laborious.Oh yeah, I’m a terrible text block skimmer and desperately need line breaks, punctuation, etc. (Also, not to mention the repetition really triggered my need to skim, lol). That many repeated phrases turned some words into white noise. So that was my bad.
Good to hear the element blocker works!
It def sounds tedious to manually block things, but like some comments have mentioned, there are probably some browser add ons that may have the functionality you seek.
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally. Period. I won’t purchase shit off of your shitty site if I can’t see it. And you obviously have no clue how shitty my vision has gotten over the years. And for the love of anything good in the world, don’t wait till I’m zoomed in to pop a fucking model asking me if I want to join your list for 10% off. If I buy something, you’re gonna put me on your list, whether I like it or not. And I can’t stop you if I actually want a receipt. So just give me the discount. Or don’t. I don’t even fucking care anymore. Just fuck off. Fuck.
a fucking model
I wouldn’t be so mad about that, unless it was a modal.
Touché
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally.
The worst is when the zoom affects the surrounding UI elements, but the part you want gets unzoomed by the same amount.
Firefox for Android. Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable zoom on all websites
Extensions -> uBlock Origin -> check “Annoyances”. Handles almost all of the random bullshit modals
I really need to switch to android. I don’t love google but the popups are killing my soul
Every time I get a newsletter pop-up I enter something like “fuckyou@dontfuckingannoyme.withyourfucking.popup.fuckingstep.on.a.lego.fuck” in the hopes that whoever manages the list sees it when cleaning out the bounces
I hear you! It sounds like you want
user-select: noneon all text, because you want the site to feel more like a real newspaper, and having too many features like text selection is distracting you.Number one thing I hate is html/css/js used for anything that is not a website. Fucking stop it.
Teams is the worst offender. It constantly wants me to call any number. Social? Phone? Whatever. I don’t want to call anyone, and I sure as hell don’t want to do it via Teams.
Teams and discord on mobile. No I don’t want to copy the whole message dang it! Just let me select part of the text!
I don’t understand what’s the end goal of this other than being frustrating. If they want a menu attached to a message we had the burger menu icon available for the best part of the last two decades.
I really dont know. I dont select text while I read it? I get the frustration but what’s the majority? If your in the minority I dont think you should be ignored but also I dont know how they cater to everyone.
I say, the majority adopt something they adopt it because that’s how the majority like it. If the majority disagrees make changes to suit their needs. If the resources exist to cater to everyone, cater to everyone. If not, as a member of the minority, its on you to find a work around or move on.
If this is the case, then the majority of people know how to copy text. It’s basic functionality of a desktop computer.
So, just let us select text without useless popups!
Fine. Except Im not really sure what the younger generations are up to these days. I think covid and two trump presidencys are going to have some real detrimental effects to the tech space.
My two cents is that we’ve been in the wild west of the internet and suitable regulations aren’t in place.
I refer mostly to all the straight up anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices that are rampant.
Though, I do not hold hope for it to be well-regulated any time soon 😅
You cater everyone by putting a context menu in that comes up when you right click or long press on a touch screen. This problem has been solved for decades. Applications aren’t designed by the majority. They’re designed by a handful of developers who I suspect are usually ordered to do shit by some moron project manager that just wants changes made so they can report to their superiors that they did something.
Oh you sweet innocent child.
I say, the majority adopt something they adopt it because that’s how the majority like it.
In the world of UIs, majorities “adopt” something they adopt because it’s the default, imposed, and people tend to just not change the defaults (or it flat out can’t be done).
but also I dont know how they cater to everyone
Add it as a tunable in settings? Most stuff has settings, it’s marginal zero effort to add a new one.
In the world of UIs, majorities “adopt” something they adopt because it’s the default, imposed, and people tend to just not change the defaults (or it flat out can’t be done).
If they willingly adopt it then its not an issue, no?
Add it as a tunable in settings? Most stuff has settings, it’s marginal zero effort to add a new one.
If its so easy they should equally be capable of implementing their own work around, no?
Whether its something that people adopted willingly or not makes no difference to whether it’s an issue. Most things can still be (or still have to be) improved. And once again, “adopt” is sus. As is “willingly” (are you “willingly” accepting something that marketing tells you to be true?).
If its so easy they should equally be capable of implementing their own work around, no?
That’s something that is done sometimes, yes. Say, Librewolf could restore some tunables that were removed from Firefox. But that still depends on how invasive the change is (and on whether you can actually implement a workaround or not, which means you’d need the code, a build system, etc).
How often do you actually use a pop-up that comes up when selecting text? And is it really more convenient than selecting followed by a right click, or pressing a shortcut?
Even if the people who select text while reading are in the minority, this post shows it’s a large minority. And I’m quite convinced that the number of times such a pop-up is used, is also a minority.
Im not arguing that it is great feature just that it doesn’t bother me. Not in the way someone who selects text while they read would. I even say if the majority of people agreed with OP I’d be fine with the changed UI. I just dont like the idea that you can shout “cater to me” and that’s automatically a valid opinion because there is some consensus.
Yeah but the thing is…there’s no reason to have some bullshit .js do some weird unexpected thing when I select text on a website. There just isn’t.
Not only is the function never the same between sites, leading to a new experience for my brain to deal with each time, but it’s also obnoxious business bro bullshit that has no place on the WWW.
It’s as annoying as the floating context bar in Illustrator and Photoshop. And i dont even typically select text while reading it
As someone who doesn’t do this, I can only guess it’s like holding your book mark parallel under the lines in a book as you read it, which I thought was fairly uncommon. Apparently a bunch of people read this way?
It makes more sense on monitors with large blocks of text or large paragraphs. With a monitor so big relative to a book, and scrolling making it easy to lose where you were, it can sometimes be tough for folks to read through huge chunks. Some people select chunks of text to help break up those monoliths into manageable bites along with putting a clear marker for where they are if they scroll or otherwise lose their place…
As someone who does occasionally do this, I don’t think it’s about readability. After all I also read books, which are not known for short bits of text in narrow columns. And I don’t use a bookmark, pen, or finger to keep track of where I’m at.
I think it’s more about keeping your hand busy, subconsciously even. Although to be honest I also don’t do that while reading books.
Maybe it’s a remnant of when every computer had a screensaver, and constantly moving the mouse meant keeping the screen alive.
For the screens I’m using, a book page is way narrower than the standard text region of a screen.
From a usability, accessibility, and comfort perspective a book is incredibly different from a device that’s blasting your eyeballs with highly contrasting light.
Seems more like the writer’s problem: everyone else selects text to perform a function. They could point with the mouse or use the bottom of the window as a guide & tap the ↓ key.
everyone else
[citation needed]
No we don’t. Everyone else selects text to select text (with left click), that’s how you copy the text, but just as importantly: that’s how you select text.
Seems kinda pointless. Maybe we need a dedicated OS for people to just fidget around for no reason: a cat jungle gym for humans.
Selecting text, a core functionality of a computer, is pointless?
Highlighting text isn’t pointless, even if you don’t personally do it.
Some of us struggle with long lines of text (people with varying degrees of dyslexia)
It literally doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And is the standard behaviour on most websites that you can select text. Who here is out there complaining about selectable text? It’s usually the opposite (because then you can’t copy)
I’m not sure you meant to come across a bit shitty, but if you meant to, I’ll invite you to think about exercising empathy for your fellow humans before you speak.
Just because you don’t use it, doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
And saying it is, after having it explained why it’s useful to others, is not very pleasant.
Selecting text, a core functionality of a computer, is pointless?
Can you identify any OS GUI in history that offered text selection without operations to perform on the selection? That was always the core function: select the input of an operation.
Some of us struggle with long lines of text (people with varying degrees of dyslexia)
There are solutions for that: accessibility standards. It’s been well researched and is basic to good UI design.
All the problems you point out leading you to do something extra just to read indicate problems addressed by fixing broken accessibility. It’d be better to fix those basic UI problems instead of defend doing extra things we shouldn’t have to do that they weren’t really designed to do.
Yes, practically all the desktop ones. You can just select text with it just selecting the text. On most websites. I’m pretty sure OP is referring to websites that “helpfully” put UI elements in the way after highlighting.
Most text editors do this well, they put the UI elements above the text, not in the way.
The vast, vast, majority of websites still do nothing when you select text.
We’re not talking about phones, you typically read that in portrait so the lines are short.
Perhaps I have made an assumption that not everyone was on the same page about.
Selecting text on android also works great with the UI that pops up there. I’m pretty sure we’re only talking about annoying websites, on desktop.
Seems the question was misread.
Can you identify any OS GUI in history that offered text selection without operations to perform on the selection?
without operations
withoutI doubt any early OS designer went “Pure selection is useful on its own. Let’s ship that without the ability to do anything to it.” then at a later iteration someone went “I have a clever idea: let’s add the ability to operate (eg, cut, copy, overwrite) on that selection!”. Even the name is suggestive: select. Select for what? Input for something.
It still seems like a criticism that picks over the wrong thing while disregarding a host of deeper problems (eg, noncompliance with accessibility standards) that led them there. Reading is basic: the text size, spacing, line length, contrast should be accessible without extra steps. Font ought to be adjustable from their user agent, so dyslexic users can set a dyslexic font. Selection popovers shouldn’t obscure the selection. Etc.
Yes, without operations visible. Highlighting text just highlights it on the vast majority of websites on desktop, right now. Unless you’re on edge, where it does obscure as soon as you let go of the mouse.
You need to right click, or use keyboard shortcuts to do anything with your highlighted text, unless your browser is getting in the way. Some websites do also get in the way.
And this is exactly what the OP wants (or rather my interpretation):
Selection popovers shouldn’t obscure the selection. Etc.
Other programs do this far better. The key complaint is that popups pop up in front of the text.
I firmly want the computer to do what I tell it to do. Not assume what I want.
The standard was if you wanted to do something with the text, you’d right click. Don’t arbitrarily change the UX in a non-standard way.
Right-click? We civilized people ctrl-c. 😁
As relatable problems go, not being able to select text solely for its own sake doesn’t feel that great of one. Doing it just feels so extra: like, why do that & just waste it? Are we hyperactive? Should we work on impulse control? Selecting highlights to show the scope of an operation.
As a nuisance, offering extra, context-relevant functionality doesn’t seem that great of one, either: I can just ignore that & ctrl-c. And I don’t see a great alternative to a popover offering that functionality. It probably saves a few clicks when done right.
Removing standard functionality, however, is extremely relatable. I’ll go into Dev Tools to remove anything disabling copy & paste, because fuck that & burn the control freak who signed off on that.
Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
Text that doesn’t wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
Excel does all those things it does because it’s always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199…4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I’d kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I’m a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn’t have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn’s cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser
C-f.Web designer/ devs needed to add back visual indicators to long articles when OS designers started hiding scroll bars.
It’s also helpful when the article ends, but has a bunch of shit below it (like required advertiser garbage or huge footers). If the up dev is smart, they’ll calculate the length of the article so that the progress indicator is accurate.
I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don’t even realise it exists.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all ‘open in browser’ things overwrite the current tab :(
I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don’t ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
“Oh, we’re following the single-page app paradigm.” No, you’re a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding “paradigm” says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
What’s wrong with infinite scroll?
As it’s most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
One: there are frequently still links (think “about us” / “contact us” kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they’re in view they’re replaced by more content.
Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, “fucking with the browser history”. It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
- If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
- Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
Doing this causes it’s own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
When you’re dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you’re lost.
When you’re going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can’t come back to where you left.
Plus if you want to find older content, you can’t just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you’re looking for.
I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don’t get it either.
That was it. So it wasn’t even original stupidity. Sad.
Hell yeah josef
I have a protocol for this.
- go to website
- if UX is offensive exit website
- add website to pihole blacklist and description of why
- never visit website again
I know it doesn’t mean much to them, but I refuse to accept a shitty online experience when a product team actively circumvents standard internet experiences like highlighting, copy/paste, or browser jacking (looking at you Microsoft).
skill issue
So today I learned there is an internet equivalent of reading with your finger while mouthing the words.
I love this comment, I see it everywhere and it fills me with fuzzies
Do this to note my place, especially when the text is smaller and the lines are long. Makes it so much easier to find the line I left off on if I have to step away, or to find my way back to the next line more easily.
It’s the equivalent of putting my finger or a bookmark down on a page in a novel.
We went from using no punctuation to using too much. I struggled while reading this.
The no capitalization makes it hard for me. I think just re-writing with capitalization makes it a lot easier to read:
Note to UI designers. When reading a long piece of text. I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it!. I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:
Note to UI designers; when reading a long piece of text, I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it! I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text, I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would have conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:
UI designers could you please, for the love of all mankind, stop fucking putting fucking shitty ass popups in the god damn non-mobile website! There is no one, and I mean no-fucking-body, that is still using a desktop computer in 2025 that does not know about ctrl-c and ctrl-v. There is not sane reason for you to ever assume a user wants to visit some shitty twitter/reddit/digg/blog when they select text on a desktop computer. If I see a single one of you motherfuckers putting fucking text inside an action I swear to god I will come down there and beat you to death with your own fucking keyboard.
I’d avoid Last Exit From Brooklyn if I were you.
