Pointless, intentional browser crippling - why??
I was browsing an online store earlier, trying to find a certain orthodontic product that I didn’t know the name of, when I finally found it.
There were no useful details about it on that site, though, so I just wanted to copy and paste the official product name into a google search. My efforts to do this simple task were denied, though, which confused and annoyed me.
I thought my Firefox may have been choking on the fact that I had a lot of windows and tabs open, but decided to view the source anyway. As it turns out, there was some javascript code (shown below) to intentionally [attempt to] prevent printing or text selection. WTF?!?
//Disable Printing
document.onselectstart=new Function(’return false’);
function ds(e){return false;}
function ra(){return true;}
document.onmousedown=ds;document.onclick=ra;
This was easy enough to defeat, though, by entering this in my location/address bar:
javascript:void(document.onmousedown=ra)In IE, an additional step was required:
javascript:void(document.onselectstart=ra)
I’m not sure what they were trying to accomplish. All I wanted to do was research the product before buying it from them, but intentionally made that difficult for me, so I will not be purchasing anything from their store.
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July 17th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Based on your experiences, I applaud your effort to shop elsewhere! This is how EVERYBODY should behave. The idiot consumers who allow themselves to be manipulated are the ones ruining the marketplace. People who vote with their wallet are true capitalists. Go!
July 18th, 2006 at 10:35 am
The only semi-valid reason I can think of to disable text selection is when you have drag-and-drop widgets happening on your page via dhtml + javascript. You don’t want a drag operation to highlight text in the process. I tried this with Google Calendar and it re-interprets the click-drag selection as a calendar-box-range-selection, which is kind of nice. But I don’t see anything that fancy or useful on the dental site! Plegh!