Closed Bug 1650666 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll behaviour change

Categories

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
DOM: Selection
Version:
77 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1621570

People

(Reporter: intracube, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:77.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/77.0

Steps to reproduce:

Setting browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll to false in config has no effect

Actual results:

All content in the URL bar gets selected when single-clicked on.

Expected results:

Cursor should be placed at the click location allowing text entry at that point. This would be consistent with other text entry fields in Firefox. The new behaviour is completely at odds with other text entry boxes.

I'm unable to comment on the main bug report, which is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?Bugzilla_remember=on&id=1621570

So I'm forced to create a new bug report to comment, even if this is correctly closed and marked as duplicate. Can comments be allowed on the master bug report as it gives the impression of not welcoming user feedback.

To echo other comments there - please restore single-click cursor placement as an option. People aren't asking for this to be the default.

As has also been mentioned, it's also inconsistent with text selection elsewhere in Firefox, eg forms (which are ultimately a text entry field just like the URL bar). So why do forms still operate on the old logic of one click to position cursor, double-click to select a word, triple-click for the line or paragraph? The new behaviour seems completely inconsistent with that. Because of this last point, it's not as if the muscle memory will slowly change with use as other parts of Firefox still operate on the old method.

I've only skimmed the other comments but many of them are highlighting these inconsistencies, e.g. :

  • "But not (almost) every other text field. It's a gratuitous inconsistency."
  • "If the URL bar were the only element in the web browser, then however it behaves would be fine. However, the URL bar is a text input field in an application that presents many text input fields. This particular field behaves differently than all the other fields, for no benefit. The only result of the inconsistent behaviour is breaking user expectations."

I don't see any clarification from a developer on this point (sorry if one was given, I may have missed it).

Also the new behaviour where single-clicked URL text shows as highlighted but isn't copied into the clipboard is really odd and goes against the visual feedback from the UI. In most other situations, where user performs a click-select action and text is highlighted - the text ends up in the clipboard.

Thanks.

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Component: Untriaged → DOM: Selection
Product: Firefox → Core

That bug was closed as WONTFIX so I'm afraid that's your answer.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE

You may want to check out this workaround which is a shell script that forces clickSelectsAll = false behavior.

(In reply to Robert Longson [:longsonr] from comment #2)

That bug was closed as WONTFIX so I'm afraid that's your answer.

If WONTFIX is to be taken as the answer, it's a rather terse one.

(In reply to Sebastian Simon from comment #3)

You may want to check out this workaround which is a shell script that forces clickSelectsAll = false behavior.

I've just gone through that manually to understand what's going on and it works as expected - thanks!

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