Just use a button

A whole generation of people who click all over to find places that do something. People have this problem where they feel 'proudly vested' in learning things that just weren't designed well.

10 years ago someone decided that dragging links is so much more important than selecting text, selecting text is scarcely possible. I'm going to have to fork a browser to give link-dragging the demotion it deserves. It was probably those DIV guys.

This is a great point that I don't see brought up enough. I don't know if I've ever purposely wanted to drag a link but I struggle to highlight/select some in a link every other day

I might be a weirdo but I drag links all the time as it's how I open links as background tabs even though there is a right-click context menu entry for it

Unless the site is _really_ messing with events, holding alt on PC (Windows/Linux/ect) or Option on macOS lets you select text in links without triggering the link to navigate.

Almost as bad as copying a phone number on iOS instead of calling it (no idea if this is better on Android). The eagerness of iOS to call phone numbers which almost never is the thing I want to happen, is a source of much anxiety.

Android works great - lets you select the # and then gives you a context menu with the option to call (or copy, or search).

...unless someone made the phone # a tel: protocol link, in which case it has the selection behavior of any other link. Which is mostly fine, since "copy" is a context menu option for tel: links... unless some jerk put a tel: URL in that isn't the same number as what is shown in the text of the link, in which case it's time for some crazy hoop-jumping to either copy OR call the number.

There are browser extensions for selecting links. It used to be called Select Like A Boss, now it's Drag-Select Link Text. tl;dr: drag horizontally to select text, drag vertically to drag-and-drop as usual, press and hold to select the whole link text.

> selecting text is scarcely possible

I find non-selectable text maddening, but I recently found an macOS app called TextSniper that restores my control. It lets you select an area with the mouse (as you would when taking a screenshot) and it then OCRs the text and puts it into your clipboard. It almost makes Google Analytics usable again.

Holy fsck! 30 years on the web and today I learn about this Alt/Option trick. Thank you!

Is there an about:config option toggle for this in Firefox? Seems like the kind of thing that should be an option in there, given everything else you can adjust, and it seems a bit much to have to need a full on browser add-on to be able to do this.

[Middle mouse button] or [left mouse button + ctrl] also does this.

How about on mobile? This is a constant headache.

Same here, that literally just changed my life

Select something directly before or after the link and then move the start and end of your selection to only select the link.