Discontinuous selections available in Firefox 3
Posted by Percy Cabello on April 5th, 2007 • Tags:
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Discontinuous text selectionA useful feature that is already available in Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 that I haven’t noticed before is the ability to make multiple discontinuous selections.

As of Firefox 2, selections are limited to continuous areas only. With this new option you can make an initial selection as usual and then keep adding text chunks by pressing the Ctrl key while making and additional selection, you can then print or copy to another application just like typical selections. I succesfully pasted a selection that included text and images in Word and Thunderbird with no problems.

It is a very helpful feature many users will appreciate as a time saver.

It is not perfect yet as it conflicts with table cell selections which also use the Ctrl + select combo. I have had mixed printed results ranging from scattered chunks of text to total messes. Accessibility issues remain unsolved as well. But we’re in the very early stages of Firefox 3 development and I guess the most complicated part is done, we can expect this to get ironed by the final release.

Comments
David Naylor said on April 5, 2007, 3:28 am:

Cool! I had no idea!

I knew this was possible in OpenOffice, but never even tried it in Firefox.

ffextensionguru said on April 5, 2007, 3:30 am:

That is cool, I need to go update my Minefield (assuming this is on the trunk buulds) and try this out.

Discontinuous Selections in Fx 3.0a3 « Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog said on April 5, 2007, 4:15 am:

[...] News Source: Mozilla Links [...]

Percy Cabello said on April 5, 2007, 7:44 am:

guru, I tried it with Alpha 3 and worked perfectly.

BTW, this enhancement was filed in bugzilla in 2001!

Novedades de Firefox « ..*+Ainulindalë+*… said on April 5, 2007, 9:10 pm:

[...] Vía: Mozilla Links  [...]

อีก 1 คุณสมบัิติเล็กๆ ใน Firefox 3 • FirefoxThai | Blog said on April 28, 2007, 10:40 pm:

[...] : Mozillalinks.org 5 เต็ม 5 (จาก 10 ผู้โหวต)  Loading [...]

Firefox v3.0b3 « A Flesh Coloured Blog said on February 12, 2008, 10:50 pm:

[...] It explains some of the changes in a relatively easy to understand way.  Also I learned about this.  You can select discontinuous text. Which I guess has been around for a while but I never tried [...]

Isaac said on February 15, 2008, 2:34 am:

Its working for me only so long as the second (or third or fourth or…) block is further down the page than the previous block…

[Alpha] Firefox 3 可以分段選取了! « 愛麗絲の鑰 said on March 14, 2008, 3:07 am:

[...] 消息來源:Discontinuous selections available in Firefox 3 : Mozilla Links Filed under: Firefox, Internet   |   [...]