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

Bug #735722 reported by Feathertail
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Chromium Browser
Unknown
Unknown
Unity
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned
unity (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

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=""

Revision history for this message
Feathertail (feathertail-deactivatedaccount) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Feathertail (feathertail-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

CLARIFICATION FROM FURTHER TESTING

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

Alex Launi (alexlauni)
Changed in unity:
status: New → Invalid
Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko) wrote :

I guess this is the following upstream issue:

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

Revision history for this message
Olivier Tilloy (osomon) wrote :

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

Changed in chromium-browser (Ubuntu):
status: New → Fix Released
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