322349 - Middle click on javascript link triggers "I'm feeling lucky" search on clipboard content

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 135884

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Daniel Dorau]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

When doing a middle click (for opening in a new tab) on an entry from that menubar on the left side, Firefox will do an "I'm feeling lucky search" on the current content of the clipboard and open the result in the current tab.
This is not what I expected and completey puzzled me until I figured out what was happening.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1034
2. Double click on a word in the top paragraph so that the word gets highlighted (and thus copied into the X clipboard)
3. In the menu on the left, open (for example) "About -> FAQ" with a MIDDLE CLICK

Actual Results:  
FF will do a google search for your highlighted word and open the result in the current tab.

Expected Results:  
The link resulting of that javascript menu should be opened in a new tab as intended. FF should NOT silently do a google search for the clipboard content and shot that as a result. This is very irritating.

Comment 1

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

You can't middle-click on javascript menus (verify this by selecting a space instead of a word, or emptying the clipboard some other way), so Firefox does the default middleclick action for the page (load the clipboard, falling back to an I'm feeling lucky search when it isn't a valid url).

To disable this behavior, you can set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false by putting about:config into the location bar. This pref defaults to true on Linux only.

(Triagers: Resolve Invalid ??)

Comment 2

[Daniel Dorau]

Ah, I see.
I feared that middle-clicking on javascript menus wouldn't work, but
since it does work on normal links, one would automatically try without looking first whether it's a plain link or some javascript stuff.

So then I would stronly ask for disabling that middlemouse.contentLoadURL setting as default, because I believe it heavily irritates users that are used to open new tabs by middle-clicking on links when FF suddenly opens completely unexpcted pages.

middlemouse.contentLoadURL = true as default I believe is bad as the average user is not aware of this "feature". Using google search makes it even worse.
The first time I experienced this I though I got a virus. You wouldn't believe where google got me to.

Thanks for the clarifiction, though.

Comment 3

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Ok, there is already a bug about making the default false.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 135884 ***

Comment 4

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

v.