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Comment by hising | Hacker News Reader

"On Linux, the behavior when clicking on the Address Bar and the Search Bar now matches other desktop platforms" - yay, I have found it annoying that you need to double-click in order to select all and start searching

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When this change was made in FF Nightly I was annoyed enough to find out why it happened and file a bug report about the regression (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619801, and a dupe at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570), but apparently it was an intended change. What's annoying is that instead of just changing the default for Linux to be in line with other platforms, the option to not select the URL when clicking was completely removed.

Now I have to click on the URL, wait a second, and then click again to place the cursor instead of selecting all. Especially annoying if you accidentally move your mouse off by a character between the two clicks. This makes me quite mad the few times per day I run into it - the feature is quite useful for changing URLs, which it turns out I do quite often, even though I'm usually not a web developer.

I'm currently compiling Firefox with the patch reverted. EDIT: It worked!!! Compiling took about an hour with an AMD Ryzen 3800x (8x 3.9-4.5 GHz) and NVMe SSD and 32 GB RAM. I'll post a link in a followup comment here with instructions on the simplest way to do this on Arch Linux (uses the build infrastructure already setup to create Arch's regular Firefox package, just modified to also revert the patch which removed this preference). Of course there's no guarantee that this will continue to work in the future as the FF codebase is updated.

If you just care about changing part of the URL, you can click and drag to highlight and then type to replace.

Dang, I never thought of that. Thanks!

Still doesn't help for adding something onto the end, but good enough for 90% of cases.

> Still doesn't help for adding something onto the end

If I'm going to need to type anyway, I'd rather do that with the keyboard than the mouse: Ctrl-L End /xyz or Ctrl-L Right /xyz feels much faster to me than "move mouse to end of address bar, click, /xyz".

(I absolutely understand that relearning/retaining muscle memory takes time and feels frustrating, though.)

I do the same thing, but with Alt-D. I thought it was strange that there are duplicate hotkeys for the function, but looking at the shortcuts page shows that's not uncommon. It seems F6 does the same thing, but I can't remember the last time I used an F-key.

Thanks for filing and discussing it. It's sad that this change landed from issue initially specified as "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll should default to true" but actually ended up as "let's toss this option away completely and be like every other average browser". :(

As promised: https://the-pwner224.neocities.org/compiling-firefox/

Yey! This is a fun one, I fixed it in Cliqz (a browser based on Firefox) a while ago: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/pull/912#issue-195908...

If you are wondering why this discrepancy in behavior between platforms: This default behavior was initially changed to prevent a 16-years old bug in SeaMonkey, which was already fixed in Firefox since 2007. See following issues for more details:

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190615

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611162

Inertia I guess... happy to see this fixed upstream!

Great work! Nice with the background to the annoyance.

Just to avoid any confusion, I have nothing to do with the change of behavior in Firefox 75. And the « fix » was only about changing the default behavior with new prefs values (the real fix was done in Firefox around 2007 but for some reason the default behavior was never reverted until now).

So is this the reason for `browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll=false` in about:config to cease to work (on Windows)? Not fortunate for me; I liked this option to NOT have it selected after single click. Triple click is for this kind of selection in my old habits.

Also when I'm clicking something that looks like text field (what Awesome Bar looks after all), my primary intention is to type there something. Even if my my intention was to select some text and I expected it, I don't expect it to open extra drop down with "top pages" (like it now does): that's what buttons usually do and what the "⌵" button in Awesome Bar in previous version did. Now click does not one, not two, but three thinks simultaneously.

Is there some pref that tells Firefox to not show those suggested options immediately after URL bar text field's focus?

I press ctrl+L to start typing an address (ctrl+K to search). You're already going to use the keyboard to type so it's easier than clicking. I prefer clicking to do the normal, expected behaviour.

As a pentester I love this fix. Like when testing simple payloads on GET params (and switching back and forth between host MacOS and Virtual Linux).

I try to use the keyboard a lot but for some reason I often "click" the address bar when searching and/or changing in the urls so I this was a caveat for me actually.

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