[removed] Disable text selection via doubleclick

Question

When double-clicking on a html page most browsers select the word you double-click on (or the paragraph you triple-click on). Is there a way to get rid of this behavior?

Answer 1

If you really want to disable selection on double-click and not just remove the selection afterwards (looks ugly to me), you need to return false in the second mousedown event (ondblclick won't work because the selection is made onmousedown).

**If somebody wants no selection at all, the best solution is to use CSS user-select : none; like Maurizio Battaghini proposed.

// set to true if you want to disable also the triple click event
// works in Chrome, always disabled in IE11
var disable_triple_click = true;

// set a global var to save the timestamp of the last mousedown
var down = new Date().getTime();
var old_down = down;

jQuery(document).ready(function($)
{
    $('#demo').on('mousedown', function(e)
    {
        var time = new Date().getTime();

        if((time - down) < 500 && 
        (disable_triple_click || (down - old_down) > 500))
        {
            old_down = down;
            down = time;

            e.preventDefault(); // just in case
            return false; // mandatory
        }

        old_down = down;
        down = time;
    });
});

Live demo here

Important notice: I set the sensitivity to 500ms but Double-click sensitivity (maximum time between clicks that is detected as a double click) can vary by operating system and browser, and is often user-configurable. - api.jquery.com

Tested in Chrome and IE11.