I was reading this Straight Dope article and had my mouse hovering over the third paragraph while I played with the shift key and the left mouse button, alternating between pressing one and the other, etc., pretty much absentmindedly. Suddenly, the third paragraph disappeared! Holy crap!
How did I do that? It’s kind of cool, but…how do I get the text back after I do that?
I just tried holding shift while double-clicking and apparently that’s what does it. Wipes out the paragraph you’re clicking on. Crazy!
Carry on.
Actually, don’t carry on. Sorry to triple post, but how do you get an individual paragraph back?
That’s cool… but… why the hell do we have this “feature”?!
Probably for when you’re reading the Dope at work and somebody says something awful in big red letters, methinks.
Man that’s weird. I found out if you click on the “Reload Current Page” icon on top, it all comes back.
So, in the Pit if you really get angry at some idiot, you can wipe out his message. 
I can’t get it to work. I feel left out. 
Me either. Firefox 1.0.7 and Win XP Pro SP-1.
Hmm, I can’t get that effect either,
BUT
what I do get is that when I hold down shift and double click on one of the quote boxes in the post, the outline of the quotebox is selected and I’ve just copied the entire text in the quotebox to the clipboard! WOW!
OK, now it’s getting really goofy. As others found it did not work, I tried it again. Now it does not work, it just highlights everything. :eek:
Firefox 1.5.04, XP SP2
You have the Adblock extension installed. Look at the word “Adblock” in the bottom right of your Firefox window, and there will be a solid or dashed underline under it. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+K will cycle it through dashed -> solid -> none.
When either the solid or dashed underline is there, shift-double-clicking will cause the element you clicked on to disappear. I guess this is for annoying advertisements you don’t want to block completely.
When the solid underline is there, shift-clicking will be intercepted by Adblock too, so you can do the shift-double-click without activating a button or link. Unfortunately this breaks things like Gmail’s ability to select a range of messages.
When the underline is gone, shift-clicking does nothing unusual.
Ah, of course! My old friend Adblock. How could I forget?
Looks like another extension took Ctrl-Shift-K, though. But thanks for the tip!
That’s because when you hold down shift and **single **click, Firefox selects (highlights) the text between the last position you clicked and the current click position. Internet Explorer does this as well, as does Microsoft Word and probably every other word processing program. It’s more obvious what’s happening with MS Word because you can see the cursor that marks the last position clicked. Firefox and IE don’t have a visible cursor but the text selection process still works as if there is one.
Try first single clicking on the paragraph you want to disappear, and then hold down shift and double click.
I was just about ready to get excited about this quick and easy way to adblock a single annoying banner until I discovered that the shift+double-click actually clicks the offending object before making it vanish.
I was immediately rewarded by a reprimand from our corporate firewall for attempting to go to a site that had “sexual materials”. Great.
Maybe there’s some trick to it?
Incidentally, the word whoa is spelled, uh, “whoa.”
Carry on.
–Cliffy
Very cool, no more dragin’ to highlight.
T’anks hammos1!
CMC fnord!
Press Ctrl+Shift+K until Adblock’s underline is solid, and shift-clicks won’t activate the object you click on.
Did you try to reload?
It’s been noted upthread that Ctrl-Shift-K switches the dotted line under the word Adblock to a solid line and then you can use the feature without double-clicking, but you have to make sure to switch it back because it messes up some websites like Gmail.
Simple.
Hit the browser RELOAD button!
