You may have noticed that Patheos has made it impossible to right-click, highlight text, or copy and paste from articles.
This change was applied site-wide, and we blog owners weren’t consulted about it. I’m told that it’s to discourage piracy of our content, which has been a problem lately.
However, I personally don’t believe this was necessary or proportionate. It’s a drastic change that inconveniences regular users and discourages discussion (how can you discuss an article if you can’t quote it?). It’s also pointless, since it’s trivially easy for determined content thieves to circumvent it.
On an unrelated note, if you find that web pages are too cluttered or too slow to load, there’s an easy way to speed up your browsing. What you want is called “reader mode”.
When you view a page in Firefox, if reader mode is supported, you’ll see an icon in the address bar that looks like a book:
If you use Google Chrome, there’s one extra step. Open a new window and go to this URL:
chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode
Enable reader mode from the dropdown, restart your browser, and then you’ll see a similar icon in the address bar:
When you’re browsing a web page, click this icon, and the browser will display it in a streamlined view without any annoying code that slows down your computer or makes it hard to view the content you want.