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I get a kick out of it when a product manager comes suggesting we diable text selection. "oh, you want to disable the single most usable and powerful interoperability feature in our product?"

"Yeah. Do we really want people leaving our app with their data?"

By leaving, do you mean kicking it off the phone or switching to another app and getting something done?

"Oh, yeah, they are just getting something done. But not in our app. So they are leaving."

I think the problem here is not becoming the Hotel California.





Disabling right click was one of the most common requests from site owners to webmasters back around 2000. They mostly wanted to prevent "Save as..." on the images, but copying article text out was also part of it.

The number of times I had to walk clients through all of the ways that users could trivially defeat whatever ‘copy protection’ we might implement… it was kind of fun to continuously counter each of their suggestions through.

Just above disabling the back button

Also opening all external links in a new window.

I can't even check out any time I like because of pop-up notifications :-(

They stil got the never leave part right.



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