On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.
It greeted me with a message: "Oh, I see you disabled JavaScript. Keep up the good work, my fellow cleanweb person!" which is an interesting departure from the usual "this app won't work without javascript". But I couldn't select the text from the message to paste it here... while looking at the header above it "Just let me select text" I thought: yeah!
[Trigger warning: Old man yells at cloud.] One of countless reasons I hate doing anything on my phone. Text selection is imprecise, slow and janky. Text input is slow and error prone, and autocorrect (or predictive text) produces danish with wrong grammar (so does Chrome). It's like using a computer with boxing gloves on. And despite phones now being huge, I prefer my triple monitor desktop. And also most apps are proprietary ad-ridden slop or borderline scams (Tinder, Happn, Hinge certainly leans heavily in that direction. I'd rather die alone than pay them money. I miss Ok-Cupid from 20 years ago.
I think it's safe to assume that being unable to select text on this page is not unintentional, as several comments here assume, nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how annoying this behavior is.
We need a browser extension that treats the rendered page as an image, then runs OCR over it, then converts that to something where text can be selected.
Pros: 1. safer (what you see is what you select), 2. also works with images, 3. all text can be selected
I run into this whenever I have to (begrudgingly) use Facebook/Instagram for something, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth it's just so blatently anti-user-friendly.
As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text.
Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions).
But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should, prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.
Exceptions to every rule, and to every exception of that rule, of course. But for the most part, allowing text highlighting in those clickable areas is a rough UX.
* note that I did not include anchor links; those are meant to be inline within text content and should therefore be selectable.
And that without counting memes and other graphic version of some text, some even sent by mail, or image captures or whatever of long and sometime critical pieces of text (i.e. certificates).
It was something not specific of mobile apps, it was something present on internet for some decades (specially when bandwidth or mailbox sizes didn't added enough to be a concern to send something as image instead of text).
But in this particular moment of history, we have AIs that can extract the text from an image, do the translation and maybe write an answer about what is there. Or be a new attack vector against AI agents.
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edit: It is intentional for sure, the other entries in this blog have selectable text.
I guess it's performance art, so, thanks, I hate it.
Pros: 1. safer (what you see is what you select), 2. also works with images, 3. all text can be selected
Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions).
But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should, prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.
Exceptions to every rule, and to every exception of that rule, of course. But for the most part, allowing text highlighting in those clickable areas is a rough UX.
* note that I did not include anchor links; those are meant to be inline within text content and should therefore be selectable.
https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Windows10-Community/issues/17
Fortunately, there is a setting for this in Firefox:
>about:config change: dom.w3c_pointer_events.scroll_by_pen.enabled set it to False.
It was something not specific of mobile apps, it was something present on internet for some decades (specially when bandwidth or mailbox sizes didn't added enough to be a concern to send something as image instead of text).
But in this particular moment of history, we have AIs that can extract the text from an image, do the translation and maybe write an answer about what is there. Or be a new attack vector against AI agents.