[trnglina]

Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Japanese text especially annoying.

[knolax]

Personally I find double click highlighting to be a useless feature in any language, but the Firefox approach is superior imo. Breaking at script boundaries is predictable behavior the user can anticipate whereas doing some janky ad hoc natural language processing invariably results in behavior that is essentially random from a user perspective. I tried out double click highlighting on some basic Japanese sentences on Chromium and it failed to highlight any of what would be considered words.

It's not like English highlighting does complex grammatical analysis to make sure "Project Manager" gets highlighted as one chunk and "eventUpdate" gets highlighted as two chunks, most implementations just breaks at spaces like the user expects.

[trnglina]

I use double-click highlighting, and the reason is mostly selecting passages of text when editing. Double-click highlighting makes it so I don't have to find the precise character boundaries for the first and last words in the passage. Instead, I can just double click the first word, roughly move my mouse to hover over the last, and copy or delete that entire passage.

Firefox's approach is fairly useless in this regard. Even if it's predictable from a technical perspective, it's not predictable for a reader who naturally processes semantic breaks rather than technical ones. Unlike in English, where a space is both semantic and visual, hiragana-kanji boundaries often don't mean anything. As a result, for me at least, Firefox's breaks feel a lot more random than Chrome's, which, while dodgy, are often fine.

Having used Firefox as my main browser since 2006, I remember when I discovered this feature in Chrome, and being shocked at how much of an effect that minor improvement had for me. It's not a deal-breaker, certainly, but it's become my one big annoyance with Firefox.

[fomine3]

I'm Japanese and I agree that Firefox behavior makes sense. For example, a text with kanji like "その機能拡張は、", A word "機能拡張" consists of "機能" + "拡張" words. In Chrome, double-click makes individual part (like 機能) selected which is rarely wanted behavior for me. In Firefox, the whole word (機能拡張) is selected, which is wanted mostly.

[taneq]

I think all of this just highlights (hah) that the way we think of human-language strings needs to change. They're not a stream of characters, they're their own thing with complex semantic rules. They should be represented as an opaque blob only manipulated via an API or passed to an OS for rendering etc.

Machine-readable strings can still just be an ASCII byte array, but we need to keep the two separate.

[microcolonel]

I feel like this is a conclusion you could only reach by having an irrational compulsion to defend the deficiencies of Firefox, and not being a regular user of the Japanese language.

[jack1243star]

I actually like this behavior more, since it is predictable. Sometimes it just works for occasional looking up proper nouns, and you can already tell if it won't.

[trnglina]

I think it depends on how engrained the double-click highlight is for you. For me, I double-click by default, since I almost always want to select at a word boundary in English. As a result, when I need to select Chinese or Japanese text, I'm always annoyed when my double click (which, in my mind, should always select a word) selects a nonsensical sub-sentence instead, and I have to then re-select it manually.

[zeroimpl]

It also prevents the dictionary lookup gesture of macOS from working in Firefox, since it selects the whole sentence and looks that up (which fails).

[Wowfunhappy]

Side note, this already doesn't work if you don't have a Touchpad / Magic mouse. The normal workflow is Right Click ==> Look Up, but Firefox overrides macOS's normal right click menu. :(

Firfox is just not a very good macOS citizen, sadly.