429992 - Differentiate between insert and replace when dragging text into location bar

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Terry]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14

Currently, when dragging selected text into the location bar, a caret (I-beam) tracks cursor movement within the box before button release. This bug is the subject of report 250622, which is a dependency of this one.

This is a specific idea for cleanly resolving that bug in a way that adds functionality -- i.e. so that the user can EITHER insert the dragged text OR have it replace the existing text altogether. It's a logical extension of the idea that the favicon represents a web location in its entirety and would complement exactly the existing behavior of the favicon when dragged into a text field (namely, inserting the address string at the caret).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Scenario A:
1. Type e.g. '?foo=bar' in any quick search. Press enter.
2. Once the search result page has loaded, select the text still in the quick search box.
3. Drag it into the location bar and drop it after (i.e. with the caret to the right of) the existing text.

Scenario B:
1. Type e.g. '?foo=bar' in any quick search. Press enter.
2. Once the search result page has loaded, select the text still in the quick search box.
3. Drag it onto the favicon (icon to the left of location address) and release.
Actual Results:  
Scenario A:
FF obliterates the current location text (despite the caret indicating it will do otherwise). Of course, it fails to find the address "?foo=bar".

Scenario B:
On dragging the text over the favicon, the cursor changes to the "unavailable" pointer indicating it's not a valid drop target. Releasing does nothing more than end the drag.

Expected Results:  
Scenario A:
"?foo=bar" is inserted after the last character in the location string. A press of the Enter key or click on the Go arrow is needed before FF will act on the modified string--you may not be finished modifying it.

Scenario B:
The current location address is replaced with the string "?foo=bar" and FF attempts (and fails) to load that location.

If there's significant feeling that this would be overkill for normal usage and that most of the time people would be wanting to drag a whole new address into the location bar, then, after fixing the current text-caret-display bug, please consider making this more robust behavior an option in the browser preferences.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.