Safari: Click in active link area results in text selection

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 21st, 2005 • 12:33 am

I regularly visit the 3hive web site. It covers music web sites for record labels or artists who share some of their own music tracks for free as MP3 files.

When I see a page with tracks that I might be interested in, I add the tracks to my Speed Download download queue.

When I do this, however, I regularly encounter a problem in Safari when clicking and dragging on a link to drop it on the Speed Download window. In order to see what the problem is for yourself, you need to load one of 3hive’s pages. Let’s pick one at random.

On this page, if you hover over the links with your cursor, you’ll see that the site uses a “mouse over” effect in which the whole link, including the small down-pointing icon on the left, becomes highlighted in dark red:

Link on 3hive page

As you can see, however, there is some empty space between the icon on the left and the text of the link on the right. In the “mouse over” effect, this space is highlighted in dark red as well, thereby indicating that it is part of the active link.

However, if you click right in that space between the small icon and the text label and drag with your mouse cursor, you’ll see that, instead of actually dragging the link, Safari will select the text of the link label, like it did with the first link in the picture above.

This is wrong. If the space between the icon and the text is highlighted when I hover over it with my mouse, it means that it’s part of the link. Consequently, when I click-and-drag on it, Safari should do the same thing as it does when I click-and-drag on the icon or on the text label, i.e. grab the link itself and allow me to drop it onto another application/window.


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