Oh God I hated that thing. I have this annoying (?) habit of highlighting and re-highlighting blocks of text while I'm reading, and it always popped up the dictionary. The balloon is definitely an improvement, but I am more than capable of looking up any word I don't know kthx.

I know right? Fucking moronic. I don't know why I double click words sometimes--to resume focus to scroll the page if some other window steals it?--but I do sometimes and WHAT THE FUCK NYT.

Actually the popup balloon made me realize that they're doing this as a revenue tie-up which I hadn't thought of before. It's just a way to make reference.com pay them money i think.

I don't get any balloon. I kind of liked the idea of the way it was, though I never actually used it.

I don't get either feature, but then I actually created a NYT login eons ago. So instead what I get is links to NYT "topic" keywords ....

My beef with them is that their NYT > US feed has been broken since September 19. I think that as much as it's hyped, My Times is not a great revenue generator for them, because multiple contacts with their tech support have failed to induce anyone to restart it. How hard is it to restart a feed that used to work perfectly?

I too would highlight and double click sort of as a placeholder or something. It didn't do anything on Safari but when I'd use my work Windows system it would open up the search window for whatever word I'd absentmindedly highlight -- like 'the'. This new system is quite nice and works in both Mac and PC.

heh. I do the highlight thing, too... sometimes for a reason (highlight where I am in the text, then scroll up to see the byline, or revisit a bit of earlier information), and very often for no particular reason at all. I'm sort of surprised to see that a lot of other people do this, too.

*High-fives rogue highlighters*

It's working for me now. Kind of cool.