# Weird website bug: Right-click "look up" **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 11, 2025, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478 "2025-06-11T15:55:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2025, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/21 "2025-06-11T22:22:02Z")
> [@Reply](#): > > t’s more bizarre than just targeting one specific word. It’s some sort of offset, mistakenly targeting things above and below the actual area being clicked on. It shows you one thing in the menu, looks up another thing, and highlights a third thing altogether… > … > > This shadow DOM thing isn’t part of the web comic itself, but a SEO and commenting thing called OpenWeb (formerly Spot.IM) that they added in order to load the comments: [Conversation](https://developers.openweb.com/docs/conversation). It injects itself into the webpage after it loads. If you add `static-cdn.spot.im` to your ad blocker, the injected comments won’t load and the bug won’t occur. Which suggests a timing issue. Somebody is capturing the DOM before all the lazy-loaded stuff is added into the page. Then the offsets are captured from the fully-customized page and applied to the pre-customized cahced page. Given the extremely dynamic nature of Discourse pages I’d expect this bug to manifest all over Discourse. Unless somehow there’s a narrow window of circumstances where the cached un-customized DOM isn’t updated and most sites happily (but only by luck) miss that small window. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2025, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/22 "2025-06-11T22:32:34Z")
@AHunter3 , it might be working properly for you, but your screenshots don’t show it. When I right-click, what I see looks correct. But when you hit ‘Look Up “expected”’, does it give you the definition of “expected”, or the definition of some other string? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2025, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/23 "2025-06-11T22:33:34Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Given the extremely dynamic nature of Discourse pages I’d expect this bug to manifest all over Discourse. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it, but no, everything on this board seems to work correctly. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2025, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/24 "2025-06-11T23:40:40Z")
> [@Reply](#): > > What macOS version? MacOS 10.14.6 ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2025, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/25 "2025-06-11T23:44:15Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > @AHunter3 , it might be working properly for you, but your screenshots don’t show it. When I right-click, what I see looks correct. But when you hit ‘Look Up “expected”’, does it give you the definition of “expected”, or the definition of some other string? Aah, I didn’t understand that the menu was showing you the correct word but invoking it would give you the wrong definition. But yeah, I went there again and highlighted a red word and actually invoked the menu item and it defined the correct word: [![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/original/3X/c/4/c42332610ddd3b281cf9f7c35739776292f04d37.jpeg) ](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/original/3X/c/4/c42332610ddd3b281cf9f7c35739776292f04d37.jpeg) ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2025, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/26 "2025-06-12T00:13:41Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Somebody is capturing the DOM before all the lazy-loaded stuff is added into the page. The shadow DOM isn’t just the regular DOM though, but like… a portal into a mirror universe where Cthlulu is an enslaved web developer writing CSS inside one HTML tag for all eternity… or something like that. Just about everything these days is lazy loaded and it’s usually fine, but most things don’t need to talk to the OS APIs the way “Look up” does. The shadow DOM is like another layer of sandboxing inside a custom HTML tag… not surprised it’s buggy. > [@AHunter3](#): > > MacOS 10.14.6 Interesting. Maybe it only affects some versions of macOS? The developers would probably appreciate that info, if you cared. That bug has been around for a couple years and they don’t seem to be in any rush to fix it. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2025, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/27 "2025-06-12T01:13:25Z")
I tried everything to get this to fail, including that codeopen.io demo site, in Safari and Chrome, with adblocker disabled, and I couldn’t reproduce the buggy behavior. I’m using Sequoia 15.5 ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2025, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/28 "2025-06-12T12:59:20Z")
My version if Sonoma 14.7.4 . ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2025, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478/29 "2025-06-12T21:32:40Z")
Intel / Apple Silicon? Discrete GPU (on some Intel Macs) or not? I mean, not that we can do anything about it anyway… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-website-bug-right-click-look-up/1019478.md?page=1)