Closed Bug 1674103 Opened 4 years ago Closed 3 years ago

Firefox ESR 78.4 urlbar in Linux selects entire URL but Fails to fill Select-Buffer or copy

Categories

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Address Bar
Version:
78 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1621570

People

(Reporter: drankinatty, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Update from Firefox 68.12 ESR to 78.4 ESR on Linux. Attempting to select URL in urlbar. Entire url selected on focus - nothing placed in Select-Buffer (except trivial text like "auto select" or "arch" ?

Actual results:

On clicking on url the Entire URL is automatically selected but NOTHING is placed in the Select-Buffer ready to be middle-mouse pasted anywhere else. I have used Firefox on Linux since the browser wars of the 90's and the entire URL should not be selected on-click on Linux to preserve the existing Select-Buffer. That is why Linux required a double-click to select to URL to ensure the user really wanted to replace the content of his current Select-Buffer.

Expected results:

Clicking on the url should NOT select the entire URL until a double-click as it has been since Firefox 2.X on Linux. When the whole URL is selected either by double-click or otherwise, the complete url should be copied to the Select-Buffer ready to be middle-mouse pasted wherever needed. This does not happen (worked fine on 68 - broken on 78 after update last night)

Further, I cannot find anywhere in about:config to restore the normal Linux urlbar behavior.

Hi,

Setting a component for this in order to get the dev team involved.
(If the team feels it's an incorrect one please feel free to change it to a more appropriate one.)

Is this related? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1615717

Best,
Clara

Component: Untriaged → DOM: Selection
Product: Firefox → Core
Flags: needinfo?(drankinatty)

It seems for me such behavior is depends on middlemouse.contentLoadURL option and conditioned by privacy policy (e.g. look at this thread).

Can confirm, on Firefox 78.6.1esr (Build-ID 20210105204613)
Tested on Kali Linux 2021.1.3, Kernel 5.10.0-1-amd64.

Clara, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1615717 is NOT the same issue. That is a forms issue related to accepting the select-buffer content on middle-mouse-click.

This is a wholesale breakage of the way the URL content works for Linux. Since the beginning of Firefox, on Linux, clicking the mouse within the URL bar did NOT select anything. This is due to the Linux efficiency of having both a select-buffer (which stores the content of the current or last highlighted text) and a copy-buffer which works like the normal clipboard in windows. The select-buffer provides the added efficiency of allowing the user to middle-mouse-paste rather than the clumsy Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Firefox has always respected the Linux select buffer by not highlighting the URL allowing the user to select portions (or all) of the URL filling the select buffer.

This no longer works. Now when the user clicks in the URL the entire URL is selected. To make matters worse, the select-buffer is NOT filled causing inconsistent behavior of the select-buffer in the Firefox URL.

Looks like an intentional front end decision not optimized for middle-click.

Component: DOM: Selection → Address Bar
Product: Core → Firefox

Selection is bug 1621570, copy is bug 1653191/bug 1633203.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(drankinatty)
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.