Closed Bug 1653381 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

Disable location bar auto-select on click

Categories

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

77 Branch
Unspecified
Linux
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1621570

People

(Reporter: atomic.isopod, Unassigned)

Details

When I click on the location bar in Firefox 75+, it automatically selects the entire URL. This is very annoying, because when I click on the location bar, I do it for precisely one reason: To place the cursor in that specific location, so that I can edit the URL. Now every time I want to do this, I have to click, wait and click again (but not too fast, so as to not trigger a double click), or click, draw a selection and then reduce that selection back down to 0 characters, just to work around this new "feature".

It is incredibly awkward. It's also inconsistent with every other textbox on my OS (Linux). But even on Windows, before I ever used Linux, I always disabled 'browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll', because it is just more usable that way. I've had this setting set to false for the last 10+ years.

Now it's been months since this change dropped, I tried to get used to it, I really did, but it still drives me nuts every single day. Can you please make this optional again? I know this is not the first complaint about this issue. I am considering compiling my own version of Firefox at this point, just to work around this issue. This can't be the answer.

Some users have provided a patch to build into Firefox to make your own build, those are not official of course.
For now we don't plan to revert the change, and even if we'd do, it would likely be a Linux only option.

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

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1)

Some users have provided a patch to build into Firefox to make your own build, those are not official of course.
For now we don't plan to revert the change, and even if we'd do, it would likely be a Linux only option.

I checked on the patch, and yes, it is not too difficult. But most people out there aren't developers. And patching your own installation feels wrong, when there are clearly enough people out there who would like the feature back. Just take a look at the number of duplicates for bug #1621570.
You wrote "We'll continue monitoring the situation and update our decision accordingly.". Now that some time has passed and many people have expressed their opinion about the lack of this functionality, I'd so much love to see you (the entire team) update your decision in favour for this feature.
Besides that, I have to work with Windows and not Linux at work, and the fact that everything gets selected on click into the URL bar still aggravates me after several months.
I so much miss the old feature.

Just my 2 cents.

André

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

(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 for Firefox on Linux.

Thank you, I appreciate the effort, but this really should be done upstream. As far as I understand, the fix is literally changing two lines. I see no reason why this can't be maintained upstream. This just seems user-hostile.

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