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?

Note that I do not want to disable regular selection via single-click+dragging; i.e. jQuery UI’s $('body').disableSelection() and the document.onselectstart DOM event are not what I want.

Answer 1

I fear you can’t prevent the selection itself being “native behavior” of the browser, but you can clear the selection right after it’s made:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.ondblclick = function(evt) {
    if (window.getSelection)
        window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();
    else if (document.selection)
        document.selection.empty();
}
</script>

Edit: to also prevent selecting whole paragraph by “triple click”, here is the required code:

var _tripleClickTimer = 0;
var _mouseDown = false;

document.onmousedown = function() {
    _mouseDown = true;
};

document.onmouseup = function() {
    _mouseDown = false;
};

document.ondblclick = function DoubleClick(evt) {
    ClearSelection();
    window.clearTimeout(_tripleClickTimer);

    //handle triple click selecting whole paragraph
    document.onclick = function() {
        ClearSelection();
    };

    _tripleClickTimer = window.setTimeout(RemoveDocumentClick, 1000);
};

function RemoveDocumentClick() {
    if (!_mouseDown) {
        document.onclick = null; 
        return true;
    }

    _tripleClickTimer = window.setTimeout(RemoveDocumentClick, 1000);
    return false;
}

function ClearSelection() {
    if (window.getSelection)
        window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();
    else if (document.selection)
        document.selection.empty();
}​

Live test case.

Should be cross browser, please report any browser where it’s not working.