Can't highlight text in Chrome? Read this. [also affects Firefox now]

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1

We have had several threads in ATMB lately about being unable to highlight text, for copying and pasting, for example. This is a bug in Chrome, and is not a problem with the SDMB itself. It is believed that this bug was introduced in the version of Chrome released on 5/26/2018.

For whatever reason, the bug only affects the SDMB Mobile theme (Sultantheme’s Responsive vB3-blue).

There are several solutions to this.

  1. Switching to the regular theme (Straightdope v3.7.3). The drop-down menu to select the theme is on the lower left side of the page.

  2. Use a different browser.

  3. Revert to an older version of Chrome.

At the time of this posting, there is no fix for the bug. When a version of Chrome is released that fixes this bug, this thread will be updated.

This thread will remain stickied until the bug has been fixed, most users have the fix, and the information here is no longer relevant.

2

Linky to something explaining the implied workaround (change to another board theme, whatever that means) ?
Thanks in advance, this is making me a bit crazypants. :frowning:
-squee

nm, I just read for comprehension and changed my theme. All better :slight_smile:

3

I agree it’s a bug in Chrome, but it’s also something the Dope could work around. I’m not finding the thread where someone else noticed it (so I can’t give them credit), but the problem is that the ::selection CSS pseudoselector is set, but has no content. If you comment out the selector entirely, the problem goes away.

I also mentioned in that thread that this is against the spec that Chrome is supposed to be following, so it will hopefully be fixed.

Edit: it was Kimble who noticed it: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21036039#post21036039

4

Not sure if it’s been pointed out yet but also - the bug doesn’t prevent you cutting and pasting.

It’s supremely annoying that you can’t see what you’re doing (or, IME, use a mouse swipe) but you can click the start of selection, shift-click the end and from there do all the cut-paste that you might want to do

5

Interesting that is is chrome’s fault when there are other vBulletin based boards that don’t have this issue (v4.2.4 in particular).

6

It’s not a board version issue, but a theme issue. Chrome is improperly interpreting a bit of custom CSS in the new theme. It’s a weird edge case that Chrome probably didn’t consider.

As I said, the tech people could remove the bad bit of CSS, but Chrome should also fix their bug.

7

Situations where TWO bugs combine to produce a failure are not unusual. Start an MPSIMS thread and I’ll tell you of a case where THREE bugs combined to make it very easy to crash a Unix kernel.
… And ALL THREE responsible programmers refused to make any of the three trivial patches, any one of which would have prevented future crashes. (It was more fun, I guess, to point fingers at the other bugs! :smack: )

8

Oddly enough I switched to Chrome because Firefox could not mark a certain page (not SDMB) that I wanted to copy.

9

I don’t know if this is related, but the CODE tag also seems to be removing end-of-lines.


line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4

Everything ends up displaying (for me at least) as being on one line even though I wrote it as four.

This is making it rather difficult to do tables.

10

Long known bug in the Sultan theme. Only known workaround is to use the PHP tag instead, and put up with the colors. Old theme is the only way to see CODE tags as intended.

Since Ed isn’t in charge anymore, I don’t know if we’ll get the Sultan theme fixed.

11

The PHP tag has other problems besides colors. The contents of the following two blocks are identical.

ความ
/Khwām/


ความ
/Khwām/
12

For some reason this just became an issue with my Chrome browser on both my home and work PCs. Switching to regular theme provided the solution, thanks for that, but it is curious why this would turn up out of the blue like that.

13

I use Firefox and just popped in here to complain about this issue. Firefox suddenly lost the ability to highlight any text on the SDMB site. Tried Chrome. Same problem. IE was fine (but who wants to be stuck using IE).

Switched themes and everything’s fine in both browsers.

It turns out that Firefox updated from version 61 to 62 yesterday. Now the incompatibility that is “the browser’s fault” is 2 out of the 3 major browsers.

14

Glad it’s not just me. Had major WTF moments over this yesterday.

15

Me, too, believe it or not.

16

I’ve reported it to the loop for our more tech-savvy mods. That sure ain’t me these days.

17

That doesn’t mean it’s not a bug in the browser. It only means that Firefox is likely copying code from Chrome. They do that a lot.

The actual spec says, and I’ll quote it this time:

The UA should use the OS-default highlight colors when neither color nor background-color has been specified by the author.

That said, the tech people here could work around this bug. Here’s a direct quote from that other thread:

18

I have this problem but have just been white-knuckling my way through.

19

I just want to add that under MacOS Mojave neither highlighting, nor C and P work in any of my browsers:
Safari, Opera, Chrome.
I have the old theme installed. I’m not going to download another browser.

20

I’d like to say that I like the theme with many fewer white pixels on my screen, and may well forgo the ability to highlight text in order to see fewer of them.