Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.
Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.
HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.
I don't much mind about the structure, but it'd be really nice if it all lined up perfectly straight.
Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.
Sometimes unconscious compulsion, otherwise to put together a quote in the context of an existing thread.
I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards :)
When using keyboard it's not that important, since one quickly learn how much PgDn scrolls, but when using mouse it is good to have a selection marker to quickly continue to read from there after scrolling.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re...
the same here.
Edit: don't need to share all that, I think.
Oddly enough I guess I always habitually deselect as well, so I've never noticed this gmail feature. Pretty useful.
Now if it browsers supported Sublime Text-style multiple selections for quoting several different bits of a long email, that'd be perfect.
On a sidenote it's kind of fascinating how polarised people are about this feature.
It's the single Windows feature I miss the most on other platforms.
I still remember the rage I felt when I switched from the Amiga in 1996 to the PC and found that Windows did that; screwing up a large part of the usability of scrollbars (for me) by adding a (to me) completely incomprehensible requirement for ultra-precise mouse movement or else you get BAM! back to where you started.
Note: not trying to claim that you are in any way "wrong", of course, I'm just pointing out the opposite perspective since I found yours interesting.
A large chunk of the reason I dislike Chrome is because of its weird text selection logic compared to Firefox - boundaries around paragraph starts and ends feel unnatural.