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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cant-highlight-text-in-chrome-read-this-also-affects-firefox-now/816468>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [June 20, 2018, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cant-highlight-text-in-chrome-read-this-also-affects-firefox-now/816468 "2018-06-20T21:09:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 17

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [September 11, 2018, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cant-highlight-text-in-chrome-read-this-also-affects-firefox-now/816468/17 "2018-09-11T02:43:49Z")

</div>

> [@peccavi](#):
>
> 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.

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](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-pseudo-4/#selectordef-selection) 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:

> [@Just updated Chrome - cannot see highlighted section](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/just-updated-chrome-cannot-see-highlighted-section/816464/7):
>
> The relevant part of the stylesheet page in question, [stvb3r.css](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/images/SultanThemeVB3R/css/stvb3r.css), is here:
> 
> ```php
> ::selection {
> /* 
> background-color: #e0f2c2;
> color: #4da400;
> */
> }
> 
> ```
> 
> […]
> 
> Moving the commenting characters to outside the ::selection element – something like
> 
> ```php
> /*
> ::selection {
> background-color: #e0f2c2;
> color: #4da400;
> }
> */
> 
> ```
> 
> seems to fix the problem on Chrome. I can’t test that easily on other browsers, though.

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cant-highlight-text-in-chrome-read-this-also-affects-firefox-now/816468)._