1720419 - browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll=false option removed

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 1621570

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Neil Skrypuch]

Yes, this is a duplicate of #1621570, a bug that has over 100 comments and (as of right now) 143 votes. But, being that it's closed as WONTFIX, I suspect that it's generally not on your radar. It was closed before I could chime in back then, but I wanted to give a bit of a retrospective at this point.

There's lots of changes that one hates initially but grows to like over time. The behaviour brought about by #1621570 is definitely not one of them for me though. It has been over a year and I have yet to find a single upside to that change, it is just strictly worse. There are two primary problems with it, namely:

1. Editing URLs
2. Copying URLs

Editing a URL means clicking once, waiting, clicking again and then finally starting your edit. This is a very common operation and is slowed down non-trivially. If you accidentally double click instead of single click twice, your paste buffer gets mangled (which quite frequently contained what you wanted to put into the URL) and you get to start all over. Speaking of paste buffers, it's not possible to simply paste your URL fragment into the address bar in the correct location with a single middle click either, because that replaces the entire URL now.

Secondly, the least painful way to copy URLs now is to double click and drag from the beginning to the end of the URL. There are a number of problems with this. For example, you may miss double clicking the http(s) in the URL (and so miss the beginning of the URL in your copy). For longer URLs, the http(s) may not even be in view, so you need to scroll over first. Also it's easy to accidentally not select all the way to the end of the URL, particularly for URLs long enough to require scrolling, resulting in copying the wrong thing.

Yes, I know triple clicking is an option too but that's just such an unusual motion. I don't use it for anything else and find it jarring to have to use it for this one oddball input field. Double click and drag (separately) are at least common motions.

Yes, I understand you want to lower your maintenance burden, I'm a developer too, I get it. But also as a developer, I both edit and copy URLs in the URL bar quite frequently, and this is a consistently infuriating process since Firefox 75. It would be really great if you would reconsider the decision to kill the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll option.

Comment 2

[Antonio Russo]

The "maintenance burden" for inserting an option to return the behavior is, in fact, zero. (I've been "maintaining" such a patch for the last year or so).

There are several projects that do this, and it's relatively simple to set it up for yourself (at least on a platform with bash, patch, and unzip). Contact me if you need help.

Comment 3

[u683078]

Developers can never compromise on user experience or workflow. Software have to deal with the variety of users that using it. Things like all culture dependent stuff are one of those. That's way more complex then making an input field dynamically selecting in some user prefer behavior. FF Developers cannot get away with a simple removal of such an important prefers setting. Deal with our needs!