Making things selectable

[Wassercrats]

Have you ever tried selecting something with your mouse and had stuff that you didn't want selected get selected, or had trouble selecting link text without clicking the link? Someone should write software to turn the left mouse button into a better, more exact, and less "smart" selecting tool. IE causes weird things to happen, like sometimes it doesn't let you stop selecting at the last letter of a word and it jumps past the space. It also jumps to the end of every word. I assume a plug-in could overcome those things. Ideally, mice would have a "smart select" button separate from the left button. The left button should be a simple selecting tool and only "smart" in that it knows that when you click and drag past more than one character, you want to select something, not click a link.

[oheso]

There's two things at work here. One is the Microsoft in its omniscience decides it knows better than you what you want to do. It assumes you want to select whole words, whole sentences, whole paragraphs. There's an option in Microsoft Word to affect this behavior, but I don't know if it affects Internet Explorer. Worth having a look, though.

The second thing that affects this is the structure of HTML. This can be very difficult to predict or influence. It's up to the way the web developer coded the page. I often find that in order to select the first/last character on the line, I end up selecting the entire start/end of the document. One answer to that of course is to view source and then search for what you're trying to copy. A bit of a pain, though.

[Wassercrats]

Nope, no option in Internet Options > Advanced.

I think it's faster to copy the entire webpage, paste into Notepad, search, and copy than to view source, search, and copy. View source isn't as fast as it was in IE 7.