> The problem is that I'm constantly selecting the lines I'm reading

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one! I compulsively select random blocks of text: select up, select down, repeat. I definitely get annoyed with the popup-menu-on-select feature of Medium, but I feel I can hardly blame Medium for my random, compulsive habit.

I share this "pain".

I have the unshakable habit of triple-clicking a paragraph to highlight it to serve as a mark of where I was at when i need to interrupt reading.

I also have the same ehabit. I a glad I am not the only one.

Interesting little curiosity about how triple-click implementation varies in some popular software =)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-click

Me too, anyone know why this is a thing? Such a common twitch... does it help reading?

I have acquired this habit from the 2 years I've spent playing Starcraft : Brood War and Starcraft 2 semi-competitively.

In the game you have to select units by dragging a box around them, and that habit has carried over to selecting text on the screen in pretty much every computer application.

I know that probably doesn't answer your question, but that would probably require a neuroscientist. It doesn't help me read personally, it just seems to be one of those repetitive tasks that slightly autistic people do.

Some of my coworkers share this habit as well, and they've never played RTS games, so it's acquired in different ways.

I do not have any data on it (1) but I think it's like moving a bookmark across the page as you are reading: it makes it easier to jump from the end of one line to the start of the next one.

(1) not even on the claim that that bookmark has that effect.

It's called meta-guiding

In french I say "astigmate". Either vertical or horizontal lines are blurred. Plus maybe you're tired. Anyway you can follow straight lines and you select something to add a visual clue of your position. "It's all because of" modern designers and their featureless screens.

I too am a highlighter

I too am a highlighter.

I too am a highlighter.

I too am a highlighter. We should form a self-help group.

I'm in.

I only learnt that the other day. I read that double clicking selects words, so I had to take it one step further.

No, clicking four times doesn't select the whole page.

I sometimes select the current line that I am reading. This helps me to quickly figure out the start of the next line when I am finished reading the current one.

So what do you guys think of HN? I get frustrated by how if I drag the selection down on HN comments, the selection will "hop" up at certain points. It's very aesthetically unpleasing, but I just need to click and drag select whatever I'm reading.

fwiw, I believe this is due to HN's archaic table-based html layout, as opposed to some javascript code like on medium and this new ms docs site.

This is it.

It has to do with border-spacing between table cells -- when you select text that runs into the border-spacing, it resets the selection to go from 1) original cell 2) start of the table 3) next cell.

With more sane styling (ie: setting border-spacing to 0), the selection won't jump to the start of the table.

I don't mind HN, you can get all sorts of pleasing patterns of highlight by dragging down nested comment hierarchies. Extra satisfying when you get the darker 'double highlight' and you can make it pop by wiggling your fingers a bit.

This is just heaven here: http://imgur.com/asQy8v3

Look at all those lovely lines and right angles.

Hey, don't sell yourself short. It's akin to using your finger while reading a book. It helps you to keep your place and focus, which the highlighting in browsers works even better for. So I wouldn't necessarily call it a quirk that Microsoft doesn't have to account for. Webdevs should really stop overriding browser defaults in detriment to the user experience. (nothing is more evil than clipboard hijacking)

I wonder what proportion of the web population does this, and if they have a demographic skew. I think I remember starting this back in the late 90's in response to a combination of extremely janky, inconsistent scrolling and tiny monitors which made me easily lose my place while reading a long article. So I'd highlight a section of text before scrolling as a marker, which developed into a compulsion over time. The constant clicking drives my friends and coworkers nuts.

I used to do this. Switching to using a MacBook full-time fixed that habit for me. Even when I connect to a big monitor, I use a trackpad, not a mouse. Harder to compulsively highlight with that thing.

Enable 3-finger drag on the trackpad and relive the old days.

Don't forget the 11-finger tap.

Damn you. :p

Not only Medium, there are lots of websites like this. BTW It seems there's lots of us compulsive clickers here on HN :)

I used to do this and then stopped once I switched to Linux where selecting text put it on a clipboard automatically.

I suspect it's related to some patterns when reading books, like putting a bookmark below your current line and moving it down, or following your current position with your finger.

> On my 32" 4K display, 70% of the screen is empty.

Totally agreed on your other points (particularly about animations on selection) but as the article mentions, eye tracking repeatedly shows people have trouble reading very wide text. Also many people use large monitors to have multiple windows, rather than a single window maximised.

I stopped maximizing my browser window a long time ago, and I only have a 27" monitor. It's just not comfortable for me.

I prefer to have my browser maximized, though it's true too wide text is not easy too read.

I've noticed also that I don't like to read text that starts on the left of the screen.

The solution that works for me is to install a sidebar (on Firefox, AiOS add-on) and if text is too wide or starts too much on the left, I enable and resize sidebar accordingly :)

> eye tracking repeatedly shows people have trouble reading very wide text

Yes but to optimize for larger screens, the correct thing to do is to scale everything up (fonts, spacing, etc) in a responsive manner.

The amount of text content per line wouldn't change much, it would just fill up the screen better instead of using the same tiny font size you'd use for a 13inch screen @ 1080p on a 32" 4K display.

Scaling up only works to a certain point. Not every screen is a phone screen and should suffer from the same amount of visible text. If I scale a page to a good line length I end up with text so comically large that only a single paragraph fits on the screen, if at all.

When lines get longer you either have to increase the leading, or font size, or shorten the lines to retain readability. Personally I hate having to detach every other tab from the browser just to change to width to something that's readable. In that sense I much prefer the content to have a maximum width beyond a certain viewport width because it's the only viable option to still have text that is readable.

No, to optimize for larger screens you simply acknowledge that it's the user's machine, not yours, and do nothing. The user will make their own choices. If they want to open multiple windows so they can read multiple columns of text, they will do that. If they want to make the text bigger, they will do that. If they like it the way it is, they'll leave it alone. Not your problem to solve.

A better option is to expand to multiple columns, like Newspapers discovered centuries ago.

That only works when your content fits on a screen because it messes with the scrolling-based nature of the web (or screen content in general – just picture how awkward it is to read an A4-portrait multi-column PDF with fit-to-width on screen).

Personally, I like well-columned stuff switching to scroll horizontally.

(It's one of the things I loved about the design style of Windows 8 apps that has been lost in the Windows 8 hate, and admittedly was a part of the Windows 8 hate, because people don't respect a good horizontal scroll of columnar reading material, sigh.)

I happily browse the Web at 125% on a 27inch monitor because I like pages to be large, but if pages made double width windows have double size content it would be like sitting directly in front of a TV.

As a substitute for 1998, a simple userscript blocking all text-selection events could do the trick. One of the great things about the web is that you can choose how to consume it - publishers are essentially powerless to prevent you building your own view on their data. Adblock, readability, etc. It can be easy to forget sometimes.

If it were 100% wide on 4K, how would your eyes scan the text? It's useful for illustrations (graphics), but I haven't met a person yet who can read wide text as efficiently as one or more narrow columns.

I've given up completely on landscape for monitors. I've rotated my two monitors to portrait. It works for websites, but it's also ideal for programming (no more looking through a letter box at the code), reading documentation and pdf pages.

I've gone for main in landscape and portrait one on the left - the only issue with portrait can be the height, I find myself having my browser starting half way down, with the top section reserved for things like a console window that aren't being looked at constantly (would be great to be able to fullscreen video on just that bit too).

What type of panels and implementations (monitors sold) work well in portrait mode? I've tried it once and I saw an odd pattern that wasn't very comfortable to look at.

TN panels are usually horrible, as they have (in landscape mode) a very limited viewing angle up or down before colours start to shift or parts of the screen appear way darker than others.

IPS panels should work without a problem in both landscape and portrait mode.

I use IPS and VA panels, but I wouldn't be able to tell what panels it was when I had the bad experience. I'll try it again, but not every IPS or VA panel is good either.

I wish this worked for games, I'd totally be a portrait user.

A triple monitor setup with 2 side monitors in portrait mode seems to be optimal these days.

That way your primary monitor can still be used to watch media and play games in the "standard" widescreen format, but your code and browser can readily be viewed on the sides.

For ergonomic reasons your work should be in front of you. If you're staring at a side monitor long term that'll wreak havoc on your neck.

Just run the games in windowed mode and you can generally change the size to however big you want.

sure but the UI is generally written to be a horizontal layout.

There are other stuff you can store on the left/right sides, especially when it's a documentation site. Typically a nice hierarchical ToC.

I've seen this claim repeatedly but it doesn't match my personal experience. I've taken to using a user stylesheet that disables max-width on all elements. It makes my subjective web experience a lot nicer.

I resize the window down to where it's more comfortable to read.

If it weren't for tabs, a window resize could help there.

> And stuff keeps moving/jumping when I'm moving the mouse cursor.

Yes it's quite bad on that blog post, but if you check out an article [1] it doesn't suffer from that problem. Still has the selection-reader [2] problem, though.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/remoteapp/remoteapp-whatis

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150528-00/?p=...

[Disclosure: I'm on the team that helped build the site]

Yes, this is a bug and something we will fix, thanks for calling this out :)

the text in [1] is not justified, that seems to make the comment icon behave differently.

It goes to the right of the paragraph in that case instead of the last sentence of the paragraph.

Hover over an image and watch it change the layout.

Use NoScript or equivalent to block scripts from the domain fyre.co. This prevents that annoying menu from popping up.

> Livefyre: The Leading Content Marketing and Engagement Platform

Looks like something to block regardless of whether it creates annoying menus. Is anyone else a little surprised (and perhaps repulsed) by Microsoft putting semi-shady 3rd-party scripts like this on their site? This seems completely opposite of what the Microsoft I knew would do.

I've seen them used to power comments on some sites, which is why I left them enabled after I installed Ghostery. I might reconsider if I see them putting junk into other websites though.

Looks like you can block just //cdn.livefyre.com/libs/sidenotes/v1.3.3/sidenotes.min.js to get rid of the inline popups.

As of yesterday they have been acquired by Adobe.

>I want 1998 back.

I'd be happy with 2011, just before the Metro-inspired redesign of MSDN hit.

Compare:

http://web.archive.org/web/20111228110049/http://msdn.micros...

http://web.archive.org/web/20130422112102/http://msdn.micros...

http://web.archive.org/web/20150102192514/http://msdn.micros...

I very much prefer the first design too.

There seems to be some plan to use less and less of the screen. I keep looking at wordpress templates and almost all of them want to use about 1/8th of my screen width which is terrible

Also a small "add comment" icon pops under each paragraph when hovering, making entire paragraphs jump up and down as I scroll down the page, it's very distracting.

The icon for adding a comment to a paragraph when there is none also causes the rest of the page text to reflow. If this is a preview of what's to come, they've migrated to a 2016 appearance and brought along all the clunkiness of the old MSDN. Kudos.

> Oh no. It pops up a quick menu when I select text, like Medium. The problem is that I'm constantly selecting the lines I'm reading. :(

I do the same thing when reading text and HATE websites that do this, the solution I've found is to just use uBlock Origin to block annoying web elements like this. You can do the same, just add the following filters:

docs.microsoft.com##body > .lf:nth-of-type(7) > .lf-active.lf-selection-popover.lf-popover > .lf-popover-content.lf-thread-content

docs.microsoft.com##body > .lf:nth-of-type(7) > .lf-active.lf-selection-popover.lf-popover > .lf-popover-arrow

or just docs.microsoft.com#.lf-selection-popover

Is there a generic way to kill the function every website that ever tries to do this to me?

> 70% of the screen is empty

Welcome to the last few years. I thought, when i bought a 24 inch monitor, I'd be using all of it; instead I'm minimizing Firefox so that sites don't look silly. I guess when you're using technology as badly designed as that used to create/display websites anything harder than justifying text and images becomes a nightmare to develop and support.

> Also, it's extremely narrow. On my 32" 4K display, 70% of the screen is empty. And the font is too think. And stuff keeps moving/jumping when I'm moving the mouse cursor.

Why maximize a browser window on such a screen? Three or four windows side by side would take advantage of it.

I don't remember 1998 too well, but I read the article formatted like this http://m.imgur.com/yWTv9Xz and I still find it preferable to the original.

Ha! So a lot of us have that strange problem! :) And I hate it too when websites do funky pop-up stuff on text selection. But somehow, I don't see that problem on this website. Which browser are you using?

I see this on Firefox on Win10. And you have to hit the back button twice to go back, which happens on a lot of Microsoft sites.

Edit: looks like it's being served from fyre.co, which might be blocked by adblockers?

> And you have to hit the back button twice to go back

Could browsers not be smarter about this? If I'm on page A and I click a link X that redirects to B, when I click back I expect to go back to A, especially if X still redirects to B.

Browsers are already smart about that, but they also allow websites to override it, which is kind of important too. And then they can mess it up.

Strange. I'm using Firefox on Win7 here, but it shouldn't have been Windows difference. Will check when I go home where I have Win10.

Oh, I found out - I was looking at a following link from the original page (https://docs.microsoft.com) - which didn't have the problem. It's there on the HN linked page. These days I fix all of these annoying pages using uBlock Origin's "Element Picker mode" and hiding them.

Block livefyre.com javascript and they stop appearing

Hold the button while you read, the popup appears on mouse button up and not on the press itself.

No

It does for me anyway, must depend on browser and device.

I really hate the popup thing.

NoScript it into oblivion or cut it out with a Greasemonkey scalpel.

What monitor do you have?