1015726 - Impractical reaction FF address bar with Linux

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[jdt37b]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140428194004

Steps to reproduce:

Hello,
This is not really a bug with Firefox and Linux but a very desired improvement:

Whichever version of Firefox:
- With Windows, a simple click in the address bar automatically selects all the address and delete (by entering with the keyboard the first letter of the desired web site) automatically the address present in the bar and Firefox can propose possible web addresses corresponding to the letter entered.


Actual results:

- With Linux, you must manually select with the mouse the whole web address in the bar and then enter the first letter of the desired site, which is far less convenient, especially when the web address is greater then the bar.



Expected results:

Maybe is it possible that Linux reacts as Windows !
Thanks.
(Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr with FF29)

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is a configuration stored in the "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" pref in about:config. It's set to false by default on non-mac unix(-like), and to true on Windows and mac. You can toggle it yourself to change the behaviour. I would imagine it works this way for platform consistency.

It looks like it's been that way since we moved from CVS to hg for version control ( http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/6fb46ac22829/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#l411 ) 7 years ago, and from CVS history, it seems it's been like this "forever" on SeaMonkey and was a bug that got fixed for Firefox 1.0, back in 2004 (bug 218315).

It also seems Chromium behaves the same.

I expect that this means we should not change it now.

Comment 2

[jdt37b]

Thank you for the reply, this easy my life !
The change is probably not necessary if the information about "... clickSelectsAll" is easy to find (because no parameter in options), especially for those (non-geek) which went from Windows to Linux and discover the difference.
Cordially.