Mozilla's new trick

Highlighting tables onscreen

[Hester]

Hold down CTRL and click on a table cell on a web page. Mozilla puts a blue border around it. You can highlight as many cells as you like. Click on them again to hide the border.

If you click high enough, you can highlight a whole table.

This is a great way to see exactly where tables and cells are placed on a page. You could use it to debug a layout or to study other people's.

It's even quicker than using the "DOM Inspector" to give a border to tables. Yet another reason to use Mozilla.

[seindal]

It doesn't just put a border around the cell, it actually selects the text for cut and paste, even if the text is not displayed in inverse colors. At least it does so under Linux.

René.

[Xuefer]

nice trick, thanks :P

[bird]

Control-click on the margin of a table cell (eg. between cells) to highlight all the cells in the table at once, including any nested tables.

[killroy]

thanks for this, but for another reason.

I've selected cells like this accidentaylly for a while and didn't know how to deselect... very anoying. I had to refresh teh page to be able to select text normally again...

hehe, that's how it goes...

SN

[seindal]

Just do ctrl-click again in the cell to deselect.

[drbrain]

Also, ctrl-click and drag.

[orlady]

Nice trick. Thanks for sharing it. :)

> Just do ctrl-click again in the cell to deselect.

Or just hit "Escape" or just do a "regular" right click in some unhighlighted part of the page. (As least those procedures work for me in Mozilla, running under Win 2000.)

[claus]

Thanks :) in IE ctrl+click selects a paragraph - sometimes it equals a table cell, sometimes not.

/claus

[Hester]

seindal: It doesn't just put a border around the cell, it actually selects the text for cut and paste, even if the text is not displayed in inverse colors. At least it does so under Linux.

Thanks for that. What's more though - if you highlight several cells then right-click and copy, it copies the contents of all the cells!

What a great way to mass-copy text from a page!

Oh wait - you can do that anyway just by dragging over the text (in IE too)...

[edited by: Hester at 11:27 am (utc) on July 30, 2003]

[killroy]

Neat, right-click one cell, then shift-click the bottom cell of a column you can insta-select a column of a table, for example the posts without the nicks ;)

SN

[bonanza]

I like it.

Another cool feature is that when you're viewing a web page you can just start typing a word and it'll search for it as you type. Then use Ctrl+G/Ctrl+Shift+G to find subsequent/previous hits.

Type ' first and you'll search only in links.

[Hester]

I found this only works in links. I get a green highlighted letter(s) starting from the first link available as soon as I press a key. It then times out and turns blue if you don't type fast enough. :)

[starec]

>>At least it does so under Linux.

The copy thing works in windows, too.

I've been using Mozilla for just 2 weeks now, but I am really impressed. The tabbed browsing, opera-like mouse movement controls, keyboard shortcuts. There are many reasons to fall in love with it.

[bonanza]

>> I found this only works in links.

Oops, my bad, got too excited.
Type a / first to search in all text.
Yes, otherwise it searches in links. The ' indicates a link search but it's not needed.

[Hester]

Ah! So that's what those new menu options in 1.4 do. (I've seen the green highlight come up before by mistake in earlier versions but not known what it was.)

Great for searching for all posts from the same name. Try it on this page!

[g1smd]

The "highlight a table cell" feature works in at least Mozilla 1.1 onwards.

I have never used any earlier versions.