I first noticed it on the Dope where I couldn’t highlight and hit Quote as I used to. Then I noticed I couldn’t highlight on random other sites, whether in Firefox or Chrome.
What’s the deal - is there some new something that I’m not aware of? Could it be my mouse (plugged in optical.) Could it be my PC? It’s a source of frustration…
The first thing I usually do for these kinds of issues that crop up is change the batteries in my mouse and my keyboard.
Works as usual for me.
My mouse and keyboard are plugged in to the PC - no batteries.
Do you have a spare keyboard or mouse to try out?
That’s frustrating.
Nope, we recently did a purge of miscellaneous computer bits. I’m wondering if it’s the PC - it’s been doing other weird things of late. From the answers here, it doesn’t sound like a website issue.
Always something…
Change the batteries in your mouse and keyboard. That is exactly how mine acts when the batteries start to get low.
You could try to check the mouse and keyboard settings to make sure nothing is amiss.
Possibly update the drivers?
Is this happening in other apps besides web browsers?
Have you tried unplugging the mouse and keyboard and plugging them back in? Closing and opening the web browsers? Restarting your entire computer?
I have a hard time seeing how a mouse issue would cause this: A mouse issue that prevented you from selecting would also prevent other clicking activities. This sounds more like a software problem to me.
I use Edge on Win11. Very occasionally text selection and typing simply quits working in the browser and only the browser. Usually after I’ve opened and closed a couple hundred tabs since the last time the browser was restarted. Since a large fraction of my browsing & tabs are here, it usually manifests at the Dope. But I don’t think it’s caused by the Dope.
Anyhow closing all the browser(s) you may have open then starting a fresh browser instance solves the problem with 100% reliability for me.
As a separate matter to the above …
There are reports that the [quote] pop-up sometimes does not appear when text is selected. I’ve seem it myself. Seems to be a random glitch, but it does sometimes happen almost regardless of device, OS, or browser. Suggesting a Discourse glitch. IME if the popup doesn’t appear, select some different text, then re-select the desired text, and the popup will appear after a couple second delay.
See here & subsequent for more:
Not necessarily. A microswitch is an electromechanical device in an analog world, and I have seen a mouse button that fails such that “click” works (most of the time) but “click-and-drag” doesn’t (most of the time), simply because the finger pressure profile of clicking the mouse button is subtly different than click-and-hold.
Or the click and hold is slightly intermittent such that your drag ends a couple milliseconds after it begins.
Of course you can’t see what happens when the content is dropped right back where it came from, just a couple pixels (if that far) away; at human speed it just looks like “Hey, drag doesn’t work”
See above - no batteries - the mouse and keyboard are plugged into the PC.
Tried it - supposedly I have the latest drivers.
Tried all of the above. No dice.
[quote=“LSLGuy, post:11, topic:1026092”]
I use Edge on Win11. [/quote]
This machine is not compatible with Win11, so it’s running Win10 - Maybe that has something to do with it. I do occasionally get a blue screen saying something about memory issues… But because of BSOD, it’s been restarted half a dozen time within the last couple of months. Plus I’ve done restarts just because.
Due to the BSOD nonsense, I was thinking I need to take it in for a once-over. So maybe that’s the answer.