Helping Hurts

In some browsers (e.g. Chrome), it's really hard to get the direct URL of submitted Imgur images.

Intuitively, I should be able to click in the text field containing the direct URL, highlight it, and either right-click and select Copy or press Control-C, Alt-C, or Command-C, depending on the operating system.

Imgur tries to help by automatically highlighting and copying the URL to the clipboard when a user clicks the text field. However, when some browsers evaluate the JavaScript code that does this, they fail to actually copy the URL to the clipboard. Since this fails silently, users may end up pasting the wrong URL somewhere else. The original URL can be irretrievably lost.

The automatic highlighting and copying prevents users from manually copying the URL. This hurts Chrome users among others. Worse, this behavior punishes users for their assumption that Imgur works like any other HTML page.

Web 2 is fine, but a Web 2 page should gracefully downgrade to Web 1 behavior. That's a practical example, here's the theory.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201622165/

P.S. The "Sign in with" pop-ups for submitting feedback don't always work in Chrome.