Whoah, I thought I was the only one with this problem. Quora drives me insane because of this type of functionality.

ALA New York Times. Although, I checked right before writing this, and it seems they got rid of it, or at least, they replaced it with a not less annoying, but potentially more profitable full page pop-up that forces you to sign up. I wonder if once singed, they have the auto-search. Can anyone confirm?

I'm a subscriber, and clicking works normally when I just checked. It used to create a lookup of some sort.

I run noscript, solves that problem.

And those sites that have popup ads on certain words - so annoying!

Usually that's because you got some adware on your computer.

Not always; Phoronix, for example, has an ad provider which double-underlines some words in articles, with monetizing links.

Those sites bug me too, as a heavy user of highlighting. It also causes me problems reading editable text, for instance in a text editor. Sometimes I'll accidentally click and drag a selection to a different part of the text without noticing. I usually notice, but if I don't it can cause problems later, especially with text that is code, where it can cause mysterious bugs to show up.

Worse: some like Trello do enter in edit mode.

The latest version of JIRA also enters edit mode. It's made JIRA that much more annoying to use for me.

I don't highlight to read, and JIRA's new behavior irritates me. When I need to copy and paste something, having the box suddenly change to edit mode throws me off.