1234067 - glitchy blue border on table selection

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Tables, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Screenshot of glitches

Not sure if this is Core::TableLayout, Core::Selection or a gfx thing.

Control-clicking (Option-clicking, on OS X) in a page with a table-based layout will frequently result in glitchy-looking blue borders around the table cells one clicked on. AFAICT, no other browser has this behavior. I only trigger this accidentally, as I'm normally Ctrl/Option-clicking to open links in a new tab. If I miss the actual link by a bit, this weird behavior results.  [I'm not even sure what exactly it's doing. Some subtle distinction between selecting parts of a table itself, vs the contents?]

https://news.ycombinator.com/ and Bugzilla are frequent sites where I hit this.

Seems to me like this is behavior we should just remove -- it's weird, Firefox-specific, and is likely to be commonly triggered when not desired. I've heard people grumble about this issue before, but I can't find a relevant bug.

Alternatively, if there's _actually_ good reason for it, it would seem better to make it look like a normal text selection (instead of borders), or fix the border rendering so they're properly aligned and connected segments.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

On pages with actual tables, this feature is great. I use it to do things like copy columns from Bugzilla searches.

On the rare pages that still use layout tables, it's mostly harmless. Users advanced enough to Cmd+click links can more or less figure out what happened.

> I've heard people grumble about this issue before, but I can't find a relevant bug.

I've seen grumbling about the feature not working perfectly, but not about it existing.

> Alternatively, if there's _actually_ good reason for it, it would seem better to make it look like a normal text selection (instead of borders)

Maybe. Table selection is a distinct state. It adds tabs/newlines when copied, and it uses rectangular selection when expanding to the selection. (Or at least it did until bug 501931 was introduced.)