Any way to prevent “deselection” of highlighted text?

Question

Highlight some text on this webpage, then click basically anywhere on the document. Your selection will disappear.

Is there a way to prevent this behavior when the

Answer 1

"return false" as well as "e.preventDefault()" in onmousedown works in FF and Safari, but not IE. The only solution for IE, as far as I can tell, is to throw an error.

This works in all browsers (but causes an error in IE, since preventDefault is not a method):

//clicking the 'test' element will not deselect text.
var test = document.getElementById("test");
test.onmousedown = function(e){
  e = e || window.event;
  e.preventDefault();
}

I'd still like to do this error-free in IE, if possible

Thanks to Paolo Bergantino for the the "onmousedown" tip.