1598913 - I am unable to select some text on Ancestry.com

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect, P3)

Description

[wrhenshaw99]

Attachment: Image of web page showing all text not being selected

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

Go to Ancestry.com.
Do a search on anybody.
In the results find a result that has an image.
1 Click on View Image.
2 On the resulting page where the image is displayed, on the right hand side is a panel with a box with three entries: Detail, Related, and Source. If the panel is not visible click on the button with the arrow pointing to the left.
3 Try to select all the text between the Detail, Related, Source box and the words Add additional information using the mouse.

Actual results:

Not all of the text is selected. All of the "labels" are selected, but not all of the "values".

Expected results:

I would have expected all of the text to be selected.
If I do the same thing in Chrome, IE, or Edge, everything is all selected.

Comment 1

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

minimal test case
data:text/html,text-outside-button<button>text-inside-button</button>text-outside-button

So Gecko explicitly does not include text inside buttons in the selection.
And very oddly the web site uses buttons which look like links.
Should be easy one to change, like just tweak
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/0678172d5b5c681061b904c776b668489e3355b0/layout/style/res/forms.css#594,611

Mirko, want to take a look at this?
Worth to test also Safari.

(FWIW, one can bypass entering credit card number on https://www.ancestry.com when creating the free account)

Comment 2

[Mirko Brodesser (:mbrodesser-Igalia)]

smaug: thanks for the reduced test-case and ideas.

Safari behaves the same like Chrome, that is, when selecting all text, the text on the button is selected too. I'll try your proposed change.

Comment 3

[Mirko Brodesser (:mbrodesser-Igalia)]

Interestingly, fixing this (by changing user-select: to text) breaks other behavior which was [desired 12 years ago (https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/0678172d5b5c681061b904c776b668489e3355b0/dom/html/test/test_bug421640.html#15-16)]: having contenteditable text selected and then clicking a button was expected to not remove the Selection of the previously selected text. Chrome behaves so too.

Moreover, the user-select: text change would allow selecting parts of the <button> text, Chrome seems to allow only the whole text on the button.

Changing the code to result in the same behavior as Chrome's while not breaking the old test is presumably more work.

Comment 4

[wrhenshaw99]

Just curious. It has been about 2 weeks since the last post to this issue. I was just wondering when a fix for this issue might be expected. I am not familiar with Firefox (I am hoping to switch from Chrome) and don't know what would be a "normal" amount of time for a fix to get done.

Thanks,
Bill

Comment 5

[Mirko Brodesser (:mbrodesser-Igalia)]

wrhenshaw99: it heavily depends on the priority of the bug and the complexity of the fix. I can't tell for this issue.

Comment 6

[wrhenshaw99]

OK. It is a shame as this is the only thing keeping me from using Firefox. I can use any other browser without any problems. It looks like a very similar problem was first reported 12 years ago and has never been fixed. I was hoping that finally we might see a fix.

Thanks,
Bill

Comment 7

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Ancestry uses extremely unusual HTML markup, and one could argue which of the behaviors is the right one. That all affects to the priority of this bug.

Comment 8

[wrhenshaw99]

I would have to say that Firefox is the odd one out. It works just fine on Internet Explorer, Edge, Edge Chromium, and Google Chrome.

Bill