Prevent Highlight of Text Table

There is a CSS3 property for that.

#yourTable {
    -webkit-touch-callout: none;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -khtml-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
}

If you want to have control when your users can select or not parts of you site, you can use this little jQuery plugin.

jQuery.fn.extend({ 
        disableSelection : function() { 
                return this.each(function() { 
                        this.onselectstart = function() { return false; }; 
                        this.unselectable = "on"; 
                        jQuery(this).css('user-select', 'none'); 
                        jQuery(this).css('-o-user-select', 'none'); 
                        jQuery(this).css('-moz-user-select', 'none'); 
                        jQuery(this).css('-khtml-user-select', 'none'); 
                        jQuery(this).css('-webkit-user-select', 'none'); 
                }); 
        } 
}); 

and use it as:

// disable selection on #theDiv object
$('#theDiv').disableSelection(); 

Otherwise, you can just use these css attributes inside your css file as:

#theDiv
 {
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -khtml-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
}

Just one note on the answer from Cleiton above - the code sample seems to work well, but in order to be a good citizen in the jQuery world, you should return the jQuery object at the end of the function so that it's chainable - a simple one-line addition fixes that up:

jQuery.fn.extend({
    disableSelection : function() {
            this.each(function() {
                    this.onselectstart = function() { return false; };
                    this.unselectable = "on";
                    jQuery(this).css('-moz-user-select', 'none');
            });
            return this;
    }
});

Cheers, hope this is helpful.

I simply remove the selection that is made using the shift key. This might show a little flicker though

if (event.shiftKey) {
    window.getSelection().removeAllRanges()
}

You can try with focus() function on the selected text - the selection dissapears.

$('#someEl').focus();