The way X traditionally manages selection, only one selection is visible at a time. Akkana says we can do this by rendering the cursor selection as (I'm making this up here) "transparent", so we could simulate this effect.

More detail: we need more than one way of rendering selection, i.e. if one window has a selection that is currently in the system clipboard, and another window has a selection which is not in the system clipboard, they should be rendered differently. Simon says that the mac has a way of rendering an inactive selection, by outlining the text that's selected rather than rendering it inverted. For the X selection model, we'll eventually want this because it'll be very confusing to users to see multiple selections on the screen and not to be able to tell which one is in the clipboard; but because table selections can be complex, we don't want to take the easy out of just saying "making a selection in one window automatically collapses selections in all other windows". We should add a boolean call soon to nsIDOMSelection/nsRangeList for something like IsClipboardSelection() (I can do that part, or maybe Simon can when he's IDL-ifying nsIDOMSelection), but then we'll eventually want a way of rendering frames (especially text frames) differently if this is the case.

putting on milestone radar.

this wont get touched this round maybe someone will go for it in m7 i dont know if i will have time but i will move it to m7 to keep it on radar

Well i dont think that hyatt got to the focus issue until late so thus I did not get to this problem. bumping to m8

just not paying attention to drawing selection in any other way than quick and dirty black for now

*** Bug 2112 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

7465 dup i believe. selection inactive and when window not in focus it should use this function *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 7465 ***

verified in 8/24 build.