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Comment by throwaway0123_5 | Hacker News Reader

In Firefox my tabs have text, and I frequently rearrange tabs with my cursor. I think this is a pretty common usage pattern (I do it on a daily basis). It would be an enormous pain if most of the area on the tab turned my arrow cursor into an I-beam cursor that I couldn't move the tab with. I checked Chrome and it looks like the tabs work the same way.

While having the text in the tabs is very useful to know what is under them, I don't think I've ever needed to actually copy the tab text. It would be a huge UX downgrade for me (and I think most people) if the tab text was selectable.

Some people might need it to be selectable for accessibility reasons and there should be a toggle for that, but I don't think "absolutely all text everywhere is selectable" is a good default.

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The example I am answering to was prefaced as being by a web dev, so I am only talking about websites here.

For Apps agree, as I can install different ones and pick the language regardless of where I am traveling, etc. And page titles (that go on browser tabs) rarely need selection/translation.

Why do you make a difference between tabs in a native app and in a web app? The optimal UX should be the same.

The essential case where it makes sense for text to be non-selectable is on objects that can be dragged around. You definitely don't want to get the text selected when the user wanted to move its container.

Typically application tabs can be moved or recorded by dragging, and tabs in web pages can't; that would justify a different treatment. But it's because of the different behaviour of the tabs, not the different media

That makes sense. I would say that at least draggable elements shouldn't be selectable on the web neither.

But should non-draggable elements in native apps be selectable?

> should non-draggable elements in native apps be selectable?

Definitely yes. I hate it when I see an error message or a button label and I can't select the text to copy it for searching comments for it on the web.

That's arguably the problem of the common interaction patterns in GUIs being non-modal. Could've been easily solved early on by having a convention like "holding Meta (Alt) makes all text on screen selectable" and sticking with it.

At this point, it's not even a technical problem anymore - it's a social one. Even if somehow OS and browser vendors all agreed on a scheme like this, copyright industry and security people would scream bloody murder and prevent it from being implemented.

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