Feb 28th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Bring Back Free Clicking
You may have noticed the new NYTimes.com feature where if you double-click on a word — no matter if the word is “to” or “all” or whatever — up pops a contextual dictionary to define it. That’s great, I guess, unless you, like me, like to click around randomly while reading text online. In that case, the Times‘ website has become all-but-unusable.
Well, I’m not alone. Kriston Capps is launching his Bring Back Free Clicking campaign complete with snazzy logo. Download your own button and post it on your site. Join the crusade!
47 Responses to “Bring Back Free Clicking”
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February 28th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Wow, this has been annoying me for weeks, and I had no idea I wasn’t the only person who did that! Thanks for making me feel like less of a freak.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Just use a pop-up blocker.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:10 am
OK, this works in Firefox anyway…
- Install Adblock from http://adblock.mozdev.org/. Restart Firefox.
- Go to the NYTimes site and view an article.
- Right-click the Adblock menu (bottom of the window) and select “List all blockable elements.”
- Look for a SCRIPT that ends with “altClickToSearch.js” and block it.
Works for me. Adblock is your friend!
February 28th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I tried to click through to Kriston’s site, but it was blocked by my admin, apparently it is pornographic. Thanks Matt!
February 28th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Seriously, what inspires you to randomly double-click on words? I can imagine a stray click here and there, but not double clicks.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:28 am
I strongly recommend the Firefox extension NoScript which stops any site from running JavaScript unless you specifically request it. The vast majority of JavaScript does undesirable things like loading ads, popping up unwanted windows, or letting ogged spy on what links you’re clicking. Use NoScript and you’ll never even notice stuff like this.
By the way, Jeremiah, double-clicking on a word is supposed to select that word. And if you don’t let go after the second click, you can drag to select the whole sentence or paragraph. It’s very handy when you copy and paste a lot.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:31 am
a plethora of useful information on this thread…i’ll have to start taking notes.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:39 am
“Seriously, what inspires you to randomly double-click on words?”
I prefer to read text on the NYT site highlighted. That is, I’ll highlight the entire paragraph I’m reading, so that the text is white on a blue background. Much easier, for me. But then, a stray click (as when, for instance, I go to highlight the next paragraph and am a little bit careless in my aim because I’m finishing up the prior paragraph) means I get a bizarre definition.
I’m pretty sure I’ve had this problem on Safari at home, although I’ll double check tonight. But for those of us corporate drones stuck with ie at work, all your workarounds are useless.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
What would Bill Clinton see if he clicked on the word “is” I wonder?
February 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
If you think matthewyglesias.com’s bot-filtering script represents ‘the vast majority of JavaScript’ then I can only say you should pay more attention to the majority of JavaScript.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Thought I was the only one who unconsciously clicked at random while reading online. I feel so much better knowing I’m not alone with this affliction!
February 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Look up anything. Then when the window opens, look up “mustache of understanding.”
February 28th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Heh. I thought I was the only one who did that.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I’m glad I’m not the only person with this nervous tic… I was annoyed by this enough that I discovered the “altClickToSearch.js” script mentioned by an earlier poster — blocking this script with AdBlock works a charm!
And, Reality Man: I am simply in awe.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:11 am
highlighting text on your blog is next to impossible, so i find your support of this campaign a bit hypocritical.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Oh my god! I hate this new feature on the NY Times! I always like to double or triple click and highlight as I read and now I can’t do that on the Times site. It is infuriating.
I’ll have to take the advice of the other commenters and download an adblock. Jeez.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Yes yes YES. While I read, I run around the page with my mouse, highlighting and clicking on chunks of text large and small. I’ve been very frustrated by the Times web page for this very reason, and I’m glad someone else is bothered by this. Frankly, the fact that some people don’t understand the problem tells me they just don’t know how to use the Internet.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I was reading the story about yesterdays stock market woes and saw reference to the city “Shenzhen”. I had no idea where it was our why it was important to the stock market. With a double-click, I got my answer. I REALLY like that feature of the NYTimes.com.
I can click and highlite text all over the NY Times page without a problem. I think all y’all need to re-think how you use a mouse. You’re double-clicking a little too much. Explore the wonders of the click-and-drag.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Personally I think this feature is awesome. Probably because my vocabulary is smaller than yours.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“Seriously, what inspires you to randomly double-click on words?”
Aeons spent editing text in Quark or InDesign. It’s become a sort of tic. Although I’m still usually suprised when a triple click doesn’t highlight a sentance or a quadruple click doesn’t highlight a paragraph.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I don’t usually double click on words, I just click and drag to highlight text. It annoys all my friends when they are reading over my shoulder. Glad to hear that this is so common amongst matthewyglesias.com readers.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
There is an RSS reader for the NYT
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/
February 28th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Instead of NoScript, use NoScriptPainfulShock. If the developer is online…. It’s much more fun.
Also good is NoScriptShockinglyLoudScreamingGuy.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
“Seriously, what inspires you to randomly double-click on words? I can imagine a stray click here and there, but not double clicks.”
It is a standard UI gesture in all text display programs (browsers, word processors, etc) that double clicking a word selects a word so that you can copy it. This is faster than drag-clicking the word. The fact that NY Times has overridden such a standard interface gesture is inexcusible. It suggests that they do not really care how users interact with their site.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Wow, get real. You want them to disable what might well be a helpful feature just because you have ADD? Jeeeez. Why not just adjust Firefox not to accept popups from nytimes.com?
Instead you have to start a really stupid campaign? I’m in awe. Dumbest thing a bloggers has done in, well, hours. But it’s pretty dumb.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Frankly, the fact that some people don’t understand the problem tells me they just don’t know how to use the Internet.
Actually, it means that the New York TImes didn’t do enough (or possibly any) user testing before they rolled out the new feature. I do some work in human-computer interaction, on the theoretical side, and there’s no way I would have foreseen this difficulty–but that’s the point of usability testing.
(Kudos for people who have figured out how to turn it off, but the solutions indicate another usability issue the site didn’t address: “Oh, you don’t like the on-by-default pop-up definitions? Think of it as an ad you’re blocking, and just in case, here’s a bit of JavaScript jargon you may find useful.” That’s fine for many people, but probably not for everyone.)
February 28th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
It is totally foreseeable.
It is a pretty common UI gesture dawning from the very early days in GUIs to double-click on a single word to select it, and then *without releasing the mouse on the second click*, drag-select. This allows one to select sentences, paragraphs etc (anything starting on a word boundary) *without having to aim* for the exact first character in the passage (see Fitt’s Law). It’s tremendously valuable (particularly in web browsers where selection behavior is kinda funky), and lots of people do it even without thinking. The Times’s “feature” breaks this workflow for negligible added value.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
YES! I hate the NY Times new popup thing and I habitually click on words and paragraphs while reading things.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Color me perplexed why or how anyone could or would read while double-clicking on random words. If doing it intentionally, the only reason I could imagine would be to copy and paste the single word in order to paste it into Google to do a search, but it would seem that double-clicking on the NYTimes starts that process for you without having to paste. It can’t be that much more difficult to just click-drag-highlight the word if you want to copy it, and if you want to copy a series of words, sentence(s), or paragraph(s) it is the rare software program (not a common software program) that will let you triple or quadruple click up to that.
I don’t even hold the mouse when I’m reading lengthy articles…doesn’t seem to make sense and it’s not really that good for you to hold your hand in that position for extended periods of time anyway. Short blog entries might be another story, but I’d have no reason to click on anything nervously or otherwise unless I wanted to copy and paste into a search engine, and it’s just as easy to click and drag as double-click for experienced users.
I don’t read the NY Times online, but if I did, and double-clicked a word to copy it, I’d probably learn after the second or third time to just click and drag on that particular site. In any case, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t complain about it, since very few casual users from my experience (as a UI engineer among other things) know or remember the double-click highlight of a single word technique to begin with, and I’ve done thousands of hours of requirements gathering, UI engineering, user testing, etc. For the masses, I’d say this is probably a neat new feature for casual users who notice and learn the technique.
February 28th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I’ve noticed that too. God it’s so fucking irritating!
February 28th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Color me perplexed why or how anyone could or would read while double-clicking on random words. If doing it intentionally, the only reason I could imagine would be to copy and paste the single word in order to paste it into Google to do a search, but it would seem that double-clicking on the NYTimes starts that process for you without having to paste.
I click and highlight text randomly when I read it online. I don’t know why I do it, I just do. I’ve noticed a couple other people hightlight stuff as they read too. There’s no reason. But I have to remember not to click on something when I’m reading then NYT, usually after I close a popup.
February 28th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
DanF-
Sure. But for that one article out of a hundred where you need a definition, hitting command-K (on a mac anyway) and typing “Shenzhen” would have taken about three seconds longer. The added annoyance factor is a lot less defensible given that there’s already an incredibly easy, non-annoying way to get more information about a given term.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Yes! I agree! I thought I was the only one who does that..
March 1st, 2007 at 3:19 am
I was completely unaware that I did, in fact, randomly click all over the screen while reading until quite recently, thanks to the NYT.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Wow, some of you mad clickers are just begging for carpal tunnel syndrome.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Hi — I wrote a greasemonkey (firefox plugin) script that stops just this bit of the javascript on the NYT web site from running.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721
earl
March 1st, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Too rich.
I came here to lodge a complaint against your hypocracy, but found that “niv” had beaten me to it:
“highlighting text on your blog is next to impossible, so i find your support of this campaign a bit hypocritical.”
Fix this, Matthew, we beg you. For the sake of the pathological highlighters, for all of the copy-and-pasters…
Bring Back Free Highlighting.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I third. Part of my random clicking involves draging and highlighting random bits of text, or maybe the paragraph I’m reading. I don’t even notice that I’m doing it any more. But here, when I highlight and nothing seems to happen, this sub-conscious activity becomes a conscious speed bump. I generally consider this to be my problem, but as we’re talking about handicapping the random clicker anyway….
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
To be a bit more specific, the highlighting only seems to be an issue in the Windows version of Firefox.
I primarily use Firefox on my Mac at home, and have no problem with it there. It’s only in Firefox on the Windows shit-box I use at work that I’m forced to endure this horror.
Matt, if you’re still reading, I implore you to check your site out on a PC and then bring back free highlighting.
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