Custom browser stylesheet: Force enabled web text selection function

This tutorial guides you how to permanently lift web pages’ restriction on text copying by customizing browser user style sheets. With browser extensions like Stylish, you can easily inject CSS code and force the user-select: text attribute to freely select and copy web content. The article will introduce detailed settings, best practices and precautions to help you effectively control your browsing experience.

Why does web pages prohibit text selection?

In daily browsing, we sometimes encounter situations where certain web page content cannot be selected or copied. This is usually because the website developers set the user-select: none attribute in CSS for the purpose of copyright protection, preventing malicious crawling, or maintaining specific interactive experiences. For example, when learning programming, if a web page containing code snippets prohibits text selection, it will greatly affect learning efficiency and code testing. This article will introduce an effective and durable way to bypass this limitation.

Solution: Force enabled text selection with user stylesheets

The browser provides a mechanism that allows users to customize the style of the website, i.e. "User Stylesheet". In this way, we can override the original CSS rules of the website, thereby forcing the text selection function to be enabled. The most convenient way to implement it is to use browser extensions.

1. Install the User Stylesheet Management Extension

Popular browser extensions are recommended, such as Stylish on Chrome or Firefox. These extensions provide an intuitive interface to manage and apply custom CSS rules.

• Installation steps:
  1. Open your browser (Chrome or Firefox).
  2. Visit the browser's extension store (Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons).
  3. Search for "Stylish" and install the extension.

2. Create and apply custom CSS rules

After Stylish is installed, you can create custom styles for specific websites or all websites.

• Operation steps:

  1. Visit the web page you want to enable text selection.
  2. Click the Stylish icon on the browser toolbar.
  3. Select "Create a new style for the current website" or "Create a new style for all websites" (as per your needs).
  4. In the code editor that pops up, enter the following CSS code:

   * {
      user-select: text !IMPORTANT;
  }

  5. Name your style (for example: "Forced text selection").
  6. Click the "Save" button.

• Code explanation:

  • *: This is a wildcard selector that applies this rule to all elements on the page.
  • user-select: text: This is a CSS property that explicitly indicates that the user can select text.
  • !IMPORTANT: This is a CSS priority modifier. It ensures that this rule has priority over the user-select: none rule of the website itself, even if the website uses its own!IMPORTANT, in most cases, the user stylesheet's!IMPORTANT will take effect.

3. Optimization and precautions

While the above general rules are simple and effective, in some cases it may cause layout or functionality of other websites. For a better experience, consider the following optimizations and considerations:

• Apply styles for specific websites: Stylish allows you to apply styles only to specific domain names or URL paths. If you only want text selection enabled on a specific website, set the scope of the application to the URL of that website when creating the style, not "all websites".

• Use more precise selectors: Wildcards* affect all elements. If you know which particular element or class prohibits selection (for example, the

  mentioned in the question), you can write more precise CSS rules:

   .s1-description-code--no-select {
      user-select: text !IMPORTANT;
  }

  Or, if you need to select all code blocks, you can try:

   pre, code, .code-block { /* Replace with the actual CSS class or tag*/
      user-select: text !IMPORTANT;
  }

  This can reduce the potential impact on other unrelated elements.

• Troubleshooting: If even if the !IMPORTANT rule is added, the text selection remains invalid, which may mean that the website uses more complex mechanisms (e.g., JavaScript dynamically removes CSS rules or styles on higher priority). In this case, you may need:

  • Use the browser developer tool (F12) to check the element to see which CSS rule or JavaScript code is blocking the selection.
  • Consider more advanced solutions, such as removing or overwriting relevant CSS rules after the page is loaded by running a custom JavaScript script. This usually requires the help of user script managers such as Tampermonkey.

• Potential Risks: While Stylish is a popular extension, there are certain security risks for any third-party extension. Please make sure to install from official channels and check its permissions regularly. In addition, forced modification of the website style may cause abnormal display or invalid functions of some websites. Please use it with caution and be prepared for rollback.

Summarize

By leveraging browser extensions and customizing user style sheets, we can effectively bypass the limitations on text selection by web pages, thereby improving the efficiency of information acquisition and learning. The core lies in understanding the application of user-select CSS attributes and !IMPORTANT rules. In practice, it is recommended to start with common rules and optimize according to actual conditions, such as using more precise selectors or applying styles for specific websites to ensure optimal compatibility and user experience. When encountering stubborn restrictions, developer tools and JavaScript scripts will be powerful weapons to further troubleshoot and resolve problems.