Discontinuous selections available in Firefox 3
A 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.


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April 5th, 2007 at 3:28 am
Cool! I had no idea!
I knew this was possible in OpenOffice, but never even tried it in Firefox.
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April 5th, 2007 at 3:30 am
That is cool, I need to go update my Minefield (assuming this is on the trunk buulds) and try this out.
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April 5th, 2007 at 7:44 am
guru, I tried it with Alpha 3 and worked perfectly.
BTW, this enhancement was filed in bugzilla in 2001!
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February 15th, 2008 at 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…
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