1179561 - want to select and copy what can't be selected now on pages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect)

Description

[Nick Levinson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150603135023

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to select text on a Web page; on some pages, not always selectable.


Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

When a Web page has a dialog, subwindow, or popup window, I'd like to be able to select and copy the text in the dialog/subwindow/popup itself, not just in fields in it. Right now, I have to type it out manually, which is less reliable when lengthy.

In Bugzilla software, I sometimes see a page in which part cannot be selected for copying. I'd like that changed, too.

I don't think any of these are images.

Comment 1

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Nick, is there any public website I can verify ? Any detailed information (test cases, and/or attachments) is appreciated. Thanks

Comment 2

[Nick Levinson]

I didn't keep examples from when I reported and, with the new request, what I found were behind logins. Here's one that's public but that's not exactly a Web page but illustrates the issue well: In Firefox 42.0, Edit menu > Preferences > Privacy > Show Cookies produces a dialog that cannot be copied, and, when there are lot of cookies from a lot of senders, that's a lot of content that cannot be selected, even if someone wants to select and copy only what's visible without drilling down. In some contexts that I recall but can't locate right now, such as (I think) in Google behind a login, what was probably either a popup window or a dialog had a button for copying to the clipboard, implying an inability to copy without supplemental programmatic help. A small example is Wikipedia behind a login, which has an Alerts menu, and while the listed items can be copied, the header and footer of the menu cannot be selected, so they cannot be copied; however, that's a small example because the unselectable text in that case is short.

I would also add on-page menus as a subject for this. It would be helpful, especially where menus are numerous, if the currently selected menu item could be copied as part of copying the page. This Bugzilla page, for example, when behind a login, has 16 menus.

On the case for this: I often keep copies of pages, such as when they're contact forms, much as people keep copies of letters they send, when they're likely to have legal consequences that commend retention. I'm dealing with a big online retailer to which I made a suggestion about processing; they so fouled up what I said that it was helpful that I had a copy of which menu item I had selected before they changed it as part of misrepresenting what I said. Also, I recently set up Google to create and provide me with a JavaScript snippet for use in a website of mine, and that snippet was presented to me in a dialog that included a menu that was part of a configuration, and what menu item I selected or was preselected is useful information to retain for future reference (I've retained it manually), in case my website seems to have a problem and I have to diagnose it.

Comment 3

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Thanks Nick. Regarding the contents of cookie window, it seems enhancement/feature request.  Can you please create a separate new bug for that ? Thanks.

Comment 4

[Nick Levinson]

I plan to, but also I found a page with nonselectable text of a type I've seen before, although not exactly as described above: Items in an ordered list (an <ol> element in HTML) with "list-style: lower-latin" are designated a-d but when I Select All then the designations are not selected, although everything else is. The page is <http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>, as accessed Jan. 22, 2016.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

It is by design that web pages can mark content as not selectable using the various vendor-specific CSS -*-user-select properties ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/user-select ).

It would be possible to write an add-on, or use a user style in the existing Stylish add-on, that lets you bypass this and forces all such content to be selectable. However, I don't think we will provide the functionality built-in, so I'm going to close this as wontfix.