Text selection in Chromium is difficult and inconsistent with the rest of the desktop

[Feathertail]

Binary package hint: chromium-browser

PROBLEM

When clicking-and-dragging to highlight text (and/or onscreen elements) in Chromium, moving the mouse cursor to the left or right of the selectable area causes a gigantic swath of text and onscreen elements to be selected. I am not sure what determines how much is selected, but this behavior is most easily observable when working with text boxes.

Other Ubuntu / Unity apps have text selection stop at the edge of a selectable text area, and require you to move the cursor up and down (while inside or outside the area) to expand the highlighted selection.

This behavior is a usability concern because it breaks people's expectations and causes undesirable behavior, and an accessibility concern because it requires precise cursor positioning in order to highlight a passage that runs to the edge of a selectable area.

HOW TO REPRODUCE

1. View this webpage in Chromium.
2. Highlight this text by clicking-and-dragging, and watch what happens when the mouse cursor is moved far enough to the left or the right.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR

Chromium's text selection behavior will be identical to the rest of the Unity desktop's, and will not cause accessibility problems for people who have trouble using a pointing device precisely.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: chromium-browser 10.0.648.133~r77742-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-6.34-generic 2.6.38-rc7
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-6-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Mar 15 16:33:41 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: chromium-browser
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-03-13 (1 days ago)
chromium-default: CHROMIUM_FLAGS=""

[Feathertail (feathertail-deactivatedaccount)]

CLARIFICATION FROM FURTHER TESTING

The behavior only works exactly as described in editable text fields. It affects other elements unpredictably.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

I guess this is the following upstream issue:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12269

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

This appears to be fixed in recent releases of chromium-browser.