Firefox addon - how to listen to a text highlight event in a webpage

Question

I am writing an addon which needs to do capture the no of times someone has highlighted any text on a webpage. Is there any way I can listen to this event?

Thanks, Kapil

Helicograph

Answer 1

There is not a particular event for this. But you can listen to the mouseup event and check whether the selection returned by window.getSelection() is not empty and/or whether it differs from the previous selection.

Baudelaire

Thanks Felix! will try this out – Helicograph

The selection can of course be modified with the keyboard as well as the mouse. – Fausta

Answer 2

You could add a selection listener. The Source window (viewSource.js) does this so that it can keep the row and column number up-to-date.

Fausta

Hi neil can you please elaborate on this. – Partite

For others interested see this topic here I will post solution here: https://mcmap.net/q/243319/-observe-for-highlight – Partite