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
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.
If you’re interested, it can also be changed in Vivaldi.
Just type “vivaldi://settings/addressbar” in the address bar, and uncheck “Select Address on Activation”, under “Address Field Options”. I strongly suggest you enable “Show Full Address” by right-clicking the address bar, otherwise it will shift the text and you will have no control over where the cursor lands.
The only other browser I use, besides these 2, is Brave, and I have not been able to find a way to fix this for it.
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.
Absolutely agree with you. I went over some, not all, of the “hidden settings” yesterday, and found nothing. I’ll keep on looking though, and if I find anything, I’ll certainly let you know.
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.I don’t think “surprise” means what you think it means 🤣🤣
I use LibreWolf instead of Firefox, so it didn’t work the first time, as it could not find a Firefox directory, evidently.
I just opened the script with Gedit, Ctrl H to replace all “Firefox” to “LibreWolf”, and it worked like a charm.
We can finally be happy.
If you’re interested, it can also be changed in Vivaldi.
Just type “vivaldi://settings/addressbar” in the address bar, and uncheck “Select Address on Activation”, under “Address Field Options”. I strongly suggest you enable “Show Full Address” by right-clicking the address bar, otherwise it will shift the text and you will have no control over where the cursor lands.
The only other browser I use, besides these 2, is Brave, and I have not been able to find a way to fix this for it.
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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.
Absolutely agree with you. I went over some, not all, of the “hidden settings” yesterday, and found nothing. I’ll keep on looking though, and if I find anything, I’ll certainly let you know.