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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the New York Times was the worst. In a similar vein, snopes.com also forbids selecting on the page. And when they "fixed" Chrome so that clicking and dragging from within a selection dragged the selection instead of starting a new selection, I died a little inside. Why would I want to drag text on a web page? I guess random clicking and selecting is no more of a useful use case, but I still find myself messing this up.

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Why would I want to drag text on a web page

I drag selected text to between tabs to create a new tab with a Google search for that text. I do that a lot.

Do you know about the "Search Google for '%query%'" in the right-click menu?

Thanks for pointing that out (not sarcasm).

Did not (also not sarcasm), thanks.

I also do that. Once in a while you get text with a colon in it, which Chrome interprets as a protocol handler and goes to about:blank. 1 in a thousand but it still gets me often. Here is a test.

drag: thistext

And yes, I've reported this bug.

works fine for me in Chrome 23.0.1271.64 on Ubuntu 12.10

I believe it's Windows only, but I'm not currently dualbooting to verify.

Any idea if this exists for Firefox? I've been looking for it for a while. It's the major feature I miss from Chrome. I've had enough of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-T, Ctrl-V.

Highlight any text and right-click. The third option down will offer to search Google using the selected text (though it probably uses your default search engine, rather than hardcoding Google).

You can also highlight any URL (it doesn't need to be a link, just look like a URL) and tell Firefox to load it by either right-clicking or by dragging it to the tab bar. Try it out on any of the following:

  google.com
  www.google.com
  http://www.google.com

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/quickdrag/

or as one comment of that extention says:

http://www.firefox.net.cn/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29894

Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know it was an option.

I do that sometimes. That way I can copy something to the clipboard and then drag something else either to a new tab or to another application.

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