562373 - annoying "URL is invalid and cannot be loaded" popup due to middlemouse.contentLoadURL set to TRUE by default

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Andrew Saturn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3

with middlemouse.contentLoadURL set to TRUE in about:config, whenever I use the middlemouse button (or two finger click with my asus laptop) on the default Firefox 3.6 install on Ubuntu Linux 9.10, I get the most annoying popup which states "The URL is invalid and cannot be loaded" because it is trying to load the contents of the clipboard as a URL.

this should not happen. if the URL is not valid, it should just do nothing. but the real problem here is that this functionality should be disabled by default. it is not useful and I only ever have it happen accidentally.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. have anything (besides a URL) in your clipboard
2. accidentally middleclick



this is critical in that if you accidentally middle-click while you were in the middle of something, you'll be swept off to a useless search page. you can click back, but you'll lose your place or (with flash content) have to start over.

Comment 2

[Andrew Saturn]

my bug is a different issue than 282634. the other bug is requesting to make the prefs the same on Linux and Windows and that is the reason it was marked as WONTFIX. my bug report is a popup which prevents you from using Firefox, not a simple preference.

it was recommended that if you don't like this behavior, to change it. I DID. and when I upgraded Firefox, my preferences were changed back to allow the popup to return.

this really should be changed. no other production quality web browser has this sort of problem.

Comment 3

[marlene]

For me, this pop-up has only appeared with the last two upgrades, and I've been using Firefox for years. Most annoyingly, sometimes, once I close the pop-up, the page will actually load, and sometimes it won't.  I don't see an actual pattern, except that it NEVER loads a page from a link in an email from meetup.com.  However, if I paste the URL into IE, it loads with no problem.

Comment 4

[marlene]

BTW... In the info section above, it says the platform is Linux.  I've got Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 3.

Comment 5

[[:Aleksej]]

If this was just a request to set the pref to "false" by default, now it would have been bug 366945.  But it's about a popup, which I do not get with 2013-10-21-03-02-03-mozilla-central-firefox-27.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64, as opposed to firefox-3.7a1pre.2009-09-01-03.en-US.linux-x86_64.