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.
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!
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.
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.
Any idea if this exists for Firefox? I've been looking for it for a while. It's the major feature I miss from Chrome. I've had enough of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-T, Ctrl-V.
Highlight any text and right-click. The third option down will offer to search Google using the selected text (though it probably uses your default search engine, rather than hardcoding Google).
You can also highlight any URL (it doesn't need to be a link, just look like a URL) and tell Firefox to load it by either right-clicking or by dragging it to the tab bar. Try it out on any of the following:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
