Disabling Annoying JavaScript Gatekeepers

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My problem

While researching a topic this morning, I ran across an annoyance on a particular website. The page was using javascript to block contextual mouse right clicking and using the mouse to select text on a page. All I wanted to do was select the blog post title and blog name to drag (or copy-paste) into a text editor for some notes I was taking on a subject. The culprit was similar to these lines of code:


document.oncopy= function(){
return false;
}
document.ondragstart= function(){
return false;
}
document.onselectstart= function(){
return false;
}

Enter RightToClick

Enables right-click, text selection, context-menu, drag&drop and much more where it is disabled by Javascript.

You may already be familiar with this Firefox extension, but I wasn’t. The tool is called, RightToClick by IKRG and is available from the Mozilla Add-Ons site here. After installing in Firefox, you can simply click on a little yellow arrow in the upper right area of your toolbar to temporarily disable some features of javascript (there is an options menu accessible by right-clicking on the yellow arrow – I found that a bit ironic for my context).

screen capture of the yellow arrow

Description from the Add-ons How To:

“RightToClick protects from annoying alert pop-ups, can remove many timer actions and is able to suppress (unusual) click behavior. The highly sophisticated engine also offers options for fine tuning. Finally it’s helpful with image downloads (also disabling CSS might be useful here)”

I downloaded and installed it, enabled it, and voila! I was able to select and copy.

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