I am really excited see this cool new feature in Fx 3 as it has been in OpenOffice.org for a while now! But, before I go into detail about what exactly are “Discontinuous Selections” I been meaning to follow-up on a feature I reported on early when Firefox 3.0a3 was Released. I found out more info (not good) about the “Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page” feature. Unfortunately, it was just as I suspected, those who have tried out this feature have quickly become annoyed and have ended up disabling it. There are too many sites (especially banking) which do legitimately redirect you to another page. Problem is (as of now) there is no White List (approved sites) feature for this option. Oh well, may be that will get worked out in one the next 3 Alphas.

Now, back to Discontinuous Selections! This is a really cool feature and is going to one of my favorites in Fx 3. Say you want to quote a couple sections of an article but the sections you want to quote are not together (discontinuous). In Fx 2 you select the first section you want to quote, copy then paste. Then you repeat the process for the next section. With Fx 3, this will be no more! Select the first section, then while holding down the control key select the next section, then do your copy and paste. I tired this out earlier tonight on the mozillaZine Firefox Builds forum. Below is a sample of discontinuous selections from the Win32 20070405 [Trunk] build major bugs list:

Now, I should warn you this feature is still in development and Percy had troubles when the sections were within tables. Further he had mixed results when trying to print selection. I also discovered when trying my example above, it behaves a little oddly with lists as well. But as he points out, “…we’re in the very early stages of Firefox 3 development and I guess the most complicated part is done, we can expect this to get ironed by the final release.”

This feature is available in the Gran Paradiso 3.0a3 release and any Minefield (nightly trunk) builds after the Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 release.

News Source: Mozilla Links