338911 - When location / URL bar is empty, display some descriptive text in it

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 396816

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Declan Naughton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060522 Minefield/3.0a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060522 Minefield/3.0a1

When location / URL bar is empty, display some (grayed out) descriptive text in it like we do now with the search engine box. Whenever the URL / location bar receives focus, the descriptive text will be gone, exact same as the search engine box.

Whatever descriptive text we decide to use (if we decide to use any) should also be set to the tooltip of the URL / location bar.

The text might be "Enter a URL to visit a webpage", or something... better...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open a new tab or enter about:blank into the URL box, or just go the old-fashioned way and remove the text in the URL / location bar



It is kinda rare that the URL bar is empty /and/ doesn't have focus. When new tabs are opened, the URL bar /has/ focus, but if you click a way (e.g. to select the search engine box) it's blank and doesn't have focus - so why not stick some text in there?

Comment 1

[Declan Naughton]

Attachment: just so there's no confusion...

Comment 2

[u279076]

I think this would be a good idea.  It should be a rather simple addition that would make the browser more user-friendly.

Can I get some input on this?

Comment 4

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified dup