Hmm, long pressing on links works on the site, but not on text. I wonder whether they are using some technique to block it? It doesn't seem blocked in Firefox on Windows.

Have you noticed this on any other sites?

No, other sites are OK.

I have this problem and I think it may be connected with how the text is "described" in the browser. Usually in order to select text from a web page (in order to copy and paste into an editor) I either select the whole page using control A or I select a part of the page using the mouse. On some web pages this fails (it still works in chrome so I think it must be a firefox problem). Control A selects those only those parts of the page that are not enclosed in some kind of box .Although one of the excluded text areas is in a scroll down box , the content of the other boxes is also excluded. Perhaps it is the "box" or frame mechanism that firefox dislikes. It is also impossible to select the text inside the scroll box or the other boxes using a mouse.

I am running firefox 34.0.5 on windows XP. I would reall like a solution to this problem other than deserting firefox, which has many features I like.

Hi mandywr, the original post was about Firefox for Android, but it sounds as though you are having the problem in Firefox for Windows.

Some scrolling boxes may be framed documents. If you click in the frame then you usually can select all in the frame. But yes, it's separate from the main document. If it's not selectable, it may be due to something in the code of the page, or it might be a plugin region (e.g., Java or Flash) which does not have to obey the standard shortcuts. Often you can distinguish a plugin region by its different right-click context menu. Also, sometimes scrolling boxes get updated dynamically, which can blow away your selection. It's hard to come up with a general solution, so if you want to share a link to a particular page where you're having problems, that might help.

Thank you. I cannot see how to link you to the page maybe because to get to the page I have to log in. When I tried to save the page as html, it saved a different page, which I have to go through to reach this page (I have no idea why). This is a screen copy of the firefox page (jpg) showing in green what is selectable with“select all”;

below is the inspection view of the relevant part of the html. I note that the bits I cannot select say 

… (for the 7% which is not selectable)

        	id=TargetRate(%) 

type=”text” disabled=”disabled” value =7% name=.....

and further down id= “LoanDescriptionValue” disabled=”disabled”, name =

I wonder if disabled=”disabled” is significant. AlsoI cannot find the “Executive Summary....” text in the HTML., so perhaps that is stored elsewhere?

I tried to click in the frame with no effect. And right click always gives the same no matter where .

Thank you for your offer to look into it.

Hi mandywr, it's true: the contents of form controls are not included when you select all on the page.

You should be able to separately select the contents of a form control after clicking in it. On this site, for example, when you are composing a reply, the right-click menu for this <textarea> includes Select All, but that means all of the text in this particular form field. (If you don't have that option, perhaps the site has figured out a way to block that?)

If you need to capture everything all at once, you could consider whether printing to PDF (might be easier to copy/paste from) or using a screen capture add-on would allow you to get what you need.

I noticed that you have some missing characters in the form field (box with two rows of two characters). Do you notice that elsewhere?

I've had the same issue. I can't say whether it's site-specific, page driven, etc. The times I've tried to sort it, the text does not appear to be part of a larger graphic element. I have not noticed the problem at all on Chrome. This is one of my big three reasons to switch to another browser. The other two are blank pages displayed when there is a valid page (5 to 10% of pages) and the lack of a way to directly view Pdf files. The download/view process is frustrating. I have mac & pcs (for years) default Firebox, and Firefox has been default on Android for 5 months. A lot of good work, clean UI, decent load times, etc, but it feels like android focus has been lost.

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