u/Resident-Swimmer7074

Edit* I thought it was only in Chrome, but it's like this in every browser! I can't be the only one seeing this.

I can't even copy and paste from canvas any longer without that stupid "Ask Gemini" popping up. The inline pop-up completely locks down standard mouse selection, making partial text selection impossible.

They built a dual-panel workspace but completely cut the bridge between the two panels. You can no longer seamlessly highlight a sentence, copy it, and paste it into the prompt box right next to it.

A feature meant to "help" actively ruins basic productivity like highlighting and copying. They fundamentally broke how web browsers and operating systems are supposed to handle text.

Here's what AI said:

Why They Did This (The Bad Code)

Google implemented a highly aggressive JavaScript listener on the Canvas panel called a selection event tracker.

1. It Hijacks Focus: The millisecond your cursor finishes highlighting text, Gemini's internal script intercepts the event and immediately focuses on rendering and pushing the "Ask Gemini" DOM element (the popup) into the foreground. [1]
2. It Steals the Clipboard State: Because the webpage forces its own custom popup menu into focus immediately upon text selection, it temporarily deselects or "blurs" your browser's primary focus on the actual text strings. This is why hitting Cmd + C fails—your Mac thinks you are trying to copy the popup menu itself, not the highlighted text behind it. [1]
3. Right-Click Clears It: The page is coded so that any contextmenu trigger (a right-click) outside of their custom bubble automatically clears the current active text selection state to close the bubble. It is an incredibly sloppy user interface design that prioritizes pushing their inline AI rewrite tool over basic global OS behavior.

Why They Nerfed It On Purpose

1. They Want to Stop the "Extract and Leave" Behavior: Google knows users historically use chatbots as a temporary scratchpad—you prompt it, copy the code/text, and instantly paste it into your local IDE, terminal, or Word document. By hijacking the cursor, they physically prevent you from leaving the tab. [1, 2]
2. They are Forcing "Inline Retention": They intentionally want to shift you away from local editing. The goal of the Canvas panel is to force you to do 100% of your formatting, expanding, rewriting, and tweaking inside Gemini Canvas using their floating AI tools. If they let you copy-paste easily, you'd do that work somewhere else. [1, 2]
3. They are Trapping Your Clipboard: By using an onmouseup event that instantly shifts the browser's active DOM focus to the popup bubble, they weaponize the browser's focus state. Because the focus shifts to the container of the bubble, your operating system (Cmd + C) literally copies a blank state or the bubble itself, rather than the highlighted text. [1]