416598 - Location bar auto-complete selection is far too sensitive

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 408723

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[David Benjamin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020904 Minefield/3.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020904 Minefield/3.0b4pre

When one wishes to type a URL and the mouse is under the location bar, the entry under the cursor is selected regardless of mouse movement.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Place the mouse cursor just under the location bar.
2. Enter the root url of some place where sub-pages often visited, e.g. Google.com
3. Do not move the mouse.
4. Press enter when typing is completed.

(In particular, the url should be such that the mouse cursor is not under desired url. It should be something like... Google Mail.)
Actual Results:  
Although the location bar says google.com, we visit Gmail, or whatever entry the mouse cursor was over when we pressed enter.

Expected Results:  
We visit google.com, the url entered.

Firefox should not select the entry underneath the mouse cursor until the user has actually moved the mouse. I cannot think of any situations, other than the user being really lucky and wanting to save an arrow-key press or a mouse nudge, that the current behavior would be desirable.

This behavior also undermines the Ctrl-L shortcut when I wish to type a normal url. If I have to make sure my mouse is not in the way of the drop-down, I might as well use the mouse to click the bar in the first place.

In addition, perhaps mouse movements should be ignored while the user is currently typing. Most people don't type and select entries with the mouse at the same time, especially when the former changes the search space of the latter.

Comment 2

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

Verified dup