Idea: disable Snopes's disabling of text selection

For some reason I don't understand, Snopes.com disables text selection with the mouse. If you try to click and drag, a JavaScript function is called that tells the browser to ignore the click.

As one workaround, you can do "Select All", copy and paste the whole page somewhere, and select whatever excerpt you want from that.

I would like a Safari extension that disables the disabling. Maybe I'll figure out how to write it myself. I wonder if there's a Firefox extension already for this.

3 thoughts on “Idea: disable Snopes's disabling of text selection

  1. After going to the snopes page you are interested in, pasting the following into the address bar and pressing enter will allow you to copy:

    javascript:void(document.onselectstart=null)

    Works in Safari 5. I would also like to see a Safari plug in that does this.

    Cheers

  2. Thanks, Mike! That works in Chrome too, and I suspect pretty much any other browser. I wrote a followup post that puts your line of JavaScript into a bookmarklet.

  3. the short javascript input at the Snopes site works wonderfully in IE9! Thanks.

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