It's a context menu, it needs to select something to contextualize.
Okay. How do I turn off selecting the background of the link? Windows computers don't have to do that. I've migrated from a Windows computer.
You get used to the way macOS works and fall in love with it, instead of trying to turn it into Windows.
I can deal with that. I've already fallen in love with most everything else, including the screen quality (where has it been all my life?)
Because the context menu for text offers dictionary look up of words, translation of entire paragraphs, cut and paste etc. For all this to work a non-empty text needs to be selected. So the OS auto-selects the word under the mouse pointer, if you haven't selected anything before. It makes sense that this is intended behavior, a feature − not a bug.
It's standard system behavior (Ventura), so I'd be surprised if FireFox didn't do it too. But it appears to only highlights text (or Finder icons). Right clicking on an image in a browser doesn't highlight the image.
Yes. It's kind of interesting. I've never noticed the various behaviors. I guess because they all make sense.
Yes, it does. At least in icon view. In list view there are two kinds of selections, highlighting a line or a border around the line. So basically left click and right click selection are independent of each other. Interesting.
Nope. Those are two different ways to trigger a secondary click, but the effect is always the same.
Yes, agree and understood: it is a good and fair question posed by OP. Just that once one gets an answer that it is just the way MacOS works, and for good reason, then I suggest don't cast around trying to find a way to defeat it.
Oh god, yeah. That's literally the first thing I change... on the Mac to turn OFF "natural scrolling"
Exactly this is a Safari behavior not a macOS behavior. I prefer Firefox a thousand times over Safari for general web browsing. I only use Safari for banking and paying bills.
I agree that it's hard to get used a different direction once you learn it one way. The problem is if you change it to the Windows method then scrolling on the trackpad sucks. I found an app called Scroll Reverser that fixes that.
It's the OS. Apps like Contacts, Notes, Mail, TextEdit, Dictionary all select a word when you right-click it. It sounds like Firefox may have overridden that behaviour, but the OS does it by default.
I think it's a great app. As to it behaving as it should I guess that depends on what behavior you want. I prefer the way Firefox behaves.
No, it doesn't. It depends on whether an app was programmed in Xcode with UIKit and makes use of all the Apple APIs. For example when you use the UITextField class, then every text field in your app automatically inherits systemwide feature like dictation and text replacement. Also all the Accessibility features for disabled people like enhanced contrast, inverted colors etc. A fullscreen app automatically becomes its own space instead of blocking the desktop and spaces are automatically ordered by last used, if you activated that option in Mission Control settings.
