I obsessively click and highlight text while I read, so it quickly becomes annoying for me.

Anyhow, I have already have the answers.com plugin for Firefox, which brings up that overlay on command.

Me too. I thought I was insane for doing that. Glad to hear at least someone else is.

There was a thread on reddit a while back. I think us click and highlighters are in good company.

http://reddit.com/info/64ek1/comments/

I use ctrl-A.

I do it too, and the WSJ feature annoys the heck out of me. I like it on Answers though, and I have the answers firefox extension as well.

Apparently WSJ knows it's annoying, because you can turn it off if you are a subscriber (IIRC).

In other words, "Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's insane" ;-)

Phew ... I am not alone

I thought I was the only person who obsessively clicked and highlighted text as I read.

We should start a club.

Meet your reddit brethren: http://reddit.com/info/5yw4h/comments/

I do this too. I'm convinced it's a vestigial habit of the "old" web, where it was very common to have a crazy img based background and text that you couldn't read. I found myself highlighting text on the web all the time just so I could get better contrast.

It's possible myspace will create a whole new generation of obsessive highlighters.

Annoying and redundant. I often find myself clicking on a page to either force focus to that window, or to select text to act as a highlight so I can find my place easily later on.

This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that I don't want.

If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of handling that.

Now, if instead double-clicking did something like spawn a topic search through NYT or news.google.com or something, without the hassle of underlining every word, I can imagine that would at least seem useful.

I dislike it, very much, mostly because it is intrusive (pop up). Its behavior violates the principle of least surprise, since most websites and applications don't do that.

If it was an inline popup box in the margin, I would probably like it.

An interesting idea, stupidly mangled by the corporate process. If they manage to make it useful that would be nice. But I suspect it's just ploy to boost pageviews, and will be measured solely on that.

You can only do one word at a time. I can look up "republic" and "day", but not the phrase "republic day".

The click time-window is long, about 800msecs. Lots of accidental pvs there.

Add the following line to Adblock Plus in Firefox:

http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

That will fix the problem.

Dislike it with a passion I normally reserve for "Are you sure you wish to close this window" popups and lightboxes.

Solutions are to block "altClickToSearch.js" with an adblocker or install a greasemonkey script such as: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721

It's a terrible idea. I bet someone had to come up with a feature to justify their IT job and created this monster. This, along with the PR "business" articles in the fashion section, made me lose the most respect for nytimes.

A browser based vocab tool is something I'd be interested in using especially for more literary sites.

I was looking for the same thing yesterday (if I understand what you mean about a vocab tool). I settled on the answers.com extension (http://www.answers.com/main/firefox_plugins.jsp). I didn't look around very hard so maybe there is something better out there.

Command-control-d is much better in Mac OS X.