Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Deb
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)?
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have a source for this? I go this same behaviour on Epiphany, Chrome, and Chromium, so it’s not just Firefox. Is there any web-browser that handles this the “correct” way?
I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.
I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)
On nautilus you can’t even click the address bar. On dolphin it still works as you say.
I didn’t even realize this until you wrote it down. That is bad. It’s the same on mobile. Consistent behavior is good. At first you select the box and then write into it. It’s good that it selects everything, otherwise you would have to select everything in order to be able to use it as the search box. It would be very annoying if it were differently.
That leads me to the question: why aren’t we using the path box to search stuff like on browsers? Dolphin even opens firefox and searches for “http://test” when I type just “test” into it. Why is http the default protocol?
Firefox originally followed the method that I see in Caja (and for that matter literally anything else that you click on) where the first time you click it simply puts the cursor in that location, a second click highlights the word, and a third click highlights the entire line. Since around FF78 they changed it so you have to click FOUR times to finally place the cursor where you are clicking. This is something I use multiple times every day to grab a portion of a URL, so the change in behavior is constantly on my mind.
Since around FF78 they changed it so you have to click FOUR times to finally place the cursor where you are clicking. This is something I use multiple times every day to grab a portion of a URL, so the change in behavior is constantly on my mind.
I think you’re double clicking. If you single click, it’s only 2 clicks. And in your case, if you’re grabbing a section, you can (single) click and hold.
On my system if I single-click it highlights the entire address. If I double-click it highlight the word (usually the parts between period and slashes). Triple-click highlights the entire URL once more. However I was not aware of the click-and-hold option! Thank you for that, it will certainly be helpful in many instances!
I still have the problem of grabbing something like an Amazon address, where I don’t want all their nonsense when I send it to someone, I just want the short link to the product. Unfortunately if the description in included in the URL (as it is in most Amazon listings) then the end of the direct URL is outside the right side of my address bar so I used to be able to just click towards the end of the visible URL then cursor over to the end of what I want to grab. The new behavior means that I either click, then have to wait a couple seconds before clicking again to place the cursor, or I click once then have move the cursor all the way from the end of the URL to get where I wanted. I think your method will let me highlight a small portion at the end of what I can see and then move the cursor from there, so I’ll wait and see how that works out in practice.
I guess I’ll have to try that too. I was sort of circumventing this by clicking once and then hitting the “HOME” key in my keyboard.
In any case, it’s much more convoluted than it was when it worked as expected.
By the way, FF78 is when they started fucking it up like this.
There has to be some “hidden” setting to flip this to how it was before. I’ve just been too lazy to research it. Guess it’s time to get off my ass and do just that.
I was actually just googling for disabling the address bar select-all and this came up near the top. Big surprise, there’s a lot of people that really hate this bug feature.
OK so I did remember correctly. I was using version 60-something before that and wasn’t sure exactly when it changed. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone else on the internet find a way to fix this problem. And there were a lot of really pissed off posters in the bug thread asking why if they went out of their way to add code to break this function, why couldn’t they have also taken another five seconds to give us a config setting to disable it.
Vivaldi does that crap too. I’m used to clicking the bar, and selecting from there. Vivaldi fucks it up by suddenly showing the “https://” part and shifting everything else to the right. So fucking annoying.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have a source for this? I go this same behaviour on Epiphany, Chrome, and Chromium, so it’s not just Firefox. Is there any web-browser that handles this the “correct” way?
I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.
I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)
On nautilus you can’t even click the address bar. On dolphin it still works as you say.
I didn’t even realize this until you wrote it down. That is bad. It’s the same on mobile. Consistent behavior is good. At first you select the box and then write into it. It’s good that it selects everything, otherwise you would have to select everything in order to be able to use it as the search box. It would be very annoying if it were differently.
That leads me to the question: why aren’t we using the path box to search stuff like on browsers? Dolphin even opens firefox and searches for “http://test” when I type just “test” into it. Why is http the default protocol?
Firefox originally followed the method that I see in Caja (and for that matter literally anything else that you click on) where the first time you click it simply puts the cursor in that location, a second click highlights the word, and a third click highlights the entire line. Since around FF78 they changed it so you have to click FOUR times to finally place the cursor where you are clicking. This is something I use multiple times every day to grab a portion of a URL, so the change in behavior is constantly on my mind.
I think you’re double clicking. If you single click, it’s only 2 clicks. And in your case, if you’re grabbing a section, you can (single) click and hold.
On my system if I single-click it highlights the entire address. If I double-click it highlight the word (usually the parts between period and slashes). Triple-click highlights the entire URL once more. However I was not aware of the click-and-hold option! Thank you for that, it will certainly be helpful in many instances!
I still have the problem of grabbing something like an Amazon address, where I don’t want all their nonsense when I send it to someone, I just want the short link to the product. Unfortunately if the description in included in the URL (as it is in most Amazon listings) then the end of the direct URL is outside the right side of my address bar so I used to be able to just click towards the end of the visible URL then cursor over to the end of what I want to grab. The new behavior means that I either click, then have to wait a couple seconds before clicking again to place the cursor, or I click once then have move the cursor all the way from the end of the URL to get where I wanted. I think your method will let me highlight a small portion at the end of what I can see and then move the cursor from there, so I’ll wait and see how that works out in practice.
I guess I’ll have to try that too. I was sort of circumventing this by clicking once and then hitting the “HOME” key in my keyboard. In any case, it’s much more convoluted than it was when it worked as expected.
By the way, FF78 is when they started fucking it up like this.
There has to be some “hidden” setting to flip this to how it was before. I’ve just been too lazy to research it. Guess it’s time to get off my ass and do just that.
Hey I might have found something… Doesn’t look like there’s been an update in awhile but appears to have been working at least through FF102. https://github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks
I’ll have to give it a try later tonight.
Awesome. I didn’t think to look for a script. Very smart of you. I’ll take it for a spin, and if will try on LibreWolf as well.
I was actually just googling for disabling the address bar select-all and this came up near the top. Big surprise, there’s a lot of people that really hate this
bugfeature.OK so I did remember correctly. I was using version 60-something before that and wasn’t sure exactly when it changed. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone else on the internet find a way to fix this problem. And there were a lot of really pissed off posters in the bug thread asking why if they went out of their way to add code to break this function, why couldn’t they have also taken another five seconds to give us a config setting to disable it.
Vivaldi does that crap too. I’m used to clicking the bar, and selecting from there. Vivaldi fucks it up by suddenly showing the “https://” part and shifting everything else to the right. So fucking annoying.