Revise change of AddressBar or reintroduction of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll and possible UI preference
Categories
(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)
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People
(Reporter: descartavel1, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0
Steps to reproduce:
More than 4 years ago firefox copied Google's changes on chrome that cause the entire text of the Address Bar to be selected when the user clicks anywhere on it, going against usability recommendations and user expectations of every single other text input element in all 5 major OSes. This change clearly benefits Google business model of trying to force the browser address bar to become a place for textual searches that can generate traffic to their search product.
Several users complained, as this is unexpected and non-standard (bug 1643973, bug 1621570, many other bugs not counting the external forums which would be too many to list). All bugs were closed by :mak with the very valid reasoning that keeping the old behaviour, or even a setting to restore it, would cause too much problems and overhead while experimenting with new Address Bar features. Ironically, i could only find places where the new behaviour caused bugs and unexpected problems with other features (bug 1199577, bug 1528614 etc). A ecosystem of work-around is showing up by now (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1643973#c12)
This bug is a request for :mak and others to revise if more than 3 years have been enough to test all the features and prototypes the old, OS-consistent behaviour was impacting. And if we are done with those experiments, to either restore the old behaviour and stop copying Google Chrome, or reintroduce the setting (ideally as 1st class setting in the user-visible UX)
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Comment 1•2 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Address Bar' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 2•2 years ago
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Hello! Thank you for submitting this issue. I will mark it as NEW in order for our developers to get involved and take this enhancement into consideration for further releases.
Have a nice day!
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Comment 3•2 years ago
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Hi, unfortunately we have features (related to security) alive and planned that depend on the current behavior, and keeping both behaviors through an option would complicate maintenance a lot. Security and privacy are high priorities for us.
This means we can't revert that change.
FWIW I don't know of any measured evidence that the 2 behaviors affect the number of searches done by the user, and even if such measurement would exist, it wouldn't be used to make a decision, that's not how we work. This decision was purely made for future security improvements and maintainability of the code base.
Description
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