570123 - Add preference to allow selecting all text in the search bar with a single click

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 801391

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[tenbob0]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11: U: Linux i686: en-US: rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423

Firefox behaves differently between Windows and Linux. Under Windows a single click highlights all the existing text in the search box. This means you can easily type a new search string and it replaces what was there before. 

Under Linux this doesn't happen. When you click you just get a line cursor and your entry is added to what's already there. It is quite laborious to delete the previous search string. Double clicking only selects one word at a time. Triple clicking is the same. So the only way you can delete the previous string is to keep pressing the delete key or use Ctrl-A.

It would be really good to have an option to make a single click select everything. Firefox already has this for the url bar with option browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll. All we need is the equivalent config for the search box.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Run Firefox under Linux. Enter "test test test" into the search box.
2.Click in browser window then in search box. 
3.Cursor moves to search box, but no text is selected. 

4.Click in browser window then double or triple click in search box. 
5.Only a single word is selected.  


Expected Results:  
It would be much better if the whole string was selected, same as on Windows.

Comment 1

[Sini Ruohomaa]

I assume we're talking about the Internet search toolbar which defaults to a Google search, as the Ctrl-F "Find" search does select all of the old search at once when hitting Ctrl-F again. 

I confirm this behaviour on Linux (Ubuntu, Gnome) and it's so annoying I was just about to ask for a "new" feature to easily clear the Internet search box.

Currently, the methods you can use on Linux (that I know of) are: 

1) Selecting the text by "painting" it with the mouse and then hitting backspace. 

This is not good, because the old search text is copied to the clipboard as a result. Generally I want to search e.g. for a paper title which I have just selected with the mouse somewhere else and want to paste into the search field with the middle button. 

In other words, I want the text to be "selected" on a single click in a way that doesn't copy it to the clipboard but makes it be replaced by my middle-button click (i.e. paste). The same way the Ctrl-F Find-box behaves when I hit Ctrl-F after an earlier search.

2) Clicking on the field and leaning on backspace and delete, etc to get the old text out. 

Slow, nasty, particularly vile because you generally hit the middle of the search string and therefore need more than one key to erase the old text.

3) Right-clicking for a context menu, selecting first "Select all" and then selecting "Delete".

This needs two menu clicks for achieving a simple and very often needed action. I expect the context menu is very generic, otherwise it probably would have a 'clear all' option to begin with. And that was what I would have suggested if I hadn't run into this bug. As it stands now I'd vastly prefer the solution proposed above.

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

The platforms have different user interface conventions. Firefox behaves as natively as possible with respect to text entry.

Comment 3

[Sini Ruohomaa]

Thanks for the response, after further digging I found out the underlying feature need has just been covered in a somewhat non-obvious way in Linux.

I've opened Bug 572638 to suggest that the Linuxistic way to
get text quickly into the URL and Search fields be made more visible to the user:

* For selecting all text in the URL field and activating it, press Ctrl-L.
* For selecting all text in the Internet search field and activating it, press
Ctrl-K. 

I hope this helps anyone who runs into this bug due to the same problem later.

Comment 4

[tenbob0]

To Kevin Brosnan. This is NOT a duplicate of bug 282634. That bug referred to the urlbar. This bug refers to the Internet search bar which behaves differently.

You can fix the problem for the urlbar using the config option browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll. You CANNOT fix the problem with the Internet search bar. That's why I posted this bug. 

Now that it's wrongly marked as a duplicate, I can't unmark it. I'll probably have to post it again. 

To Sini Ruohomaa. Thanks for the tips. But these keyboard shortcuts are hard to remember. I want to do it easily with the mouse.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Not a dupe. Undoing the action and confirming bug.

Comment 6

[Rob Crowther]

I would like to see this bug fixed so that I can turn off click selects all in Windows.  Either the address bar should get its own preference or it should follow the existing browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll one (unless anyone can think of a good reason why a user would want the two to behave differently?).

Comment 7

[Fedge]

Switching from Windows on my home workstations to Linux has made this an annoyance for me as well. Today I figured out how to fix the URL bar but the search bar still bothers me.

Comment 8

[hbi]

Well, I found this so annoying, that I tried to right-click in about:config, created a new key with the name:"browser.search.ClickSelectsAll", anr setting the value to:"true". Restarting Firefox, and it worked (for me at least).
Wonder if it will survive through an update from v. 50.1.0 on Linux mint

Comment 9

[alexdswag]

(In reply to hbi from comment #8)
> Well, I found this so annoying, that I tried to right-click in about:config,
> created a new key with the name:"browser.search.ClickSelectsAll", anr
> setting the value to:"true". Restarting Firefox, and it worked (for me at
> least).
> Wonder if it will survive through an update from v. 50.1.0 on Linux mint

YOU ARE ARE THE REAL MVP

Comment 10

[Shivang Agarwal]

I would like to work on this bug how do i get it assigned.

Comment 11

[jeffreymarius]

(In reply to Shivang Agarwal from comment #10)
> I would like to work on this bug how do i get it assigned.

Please start working and when you have solved the issue in your setup, then upload the patch. And only then, the bug would be assigned to you and also it is mandatory to keep posting comments in bugzilla to let others know you are working on it.

Comment 12

[Kim Ludvigsen]

A shame that it took 4 month to let Shivang know what to do to work on the bug. Apparently that was too long time. 

Anyway, selecting the text in the search box when clicking used to work fine on my Linux Mint; however, after upgrading from Firefox 55 to Firefox 59.01 (I have been travelling) it no longer worked. Perhaps due to an extension that no longer works in Firefox 59.

I can confirm that the mentioned solution to create a new key in about:config still works like a charm in Firefox 59.

Shivang, if you are still here, it would be nice to have a bug fix.

Comment 13

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

As of bug 801391 (Firefox 60), clicking in the search bar reflects the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll pref. On Windows & Mac that defaults to true, on Linux it defaults to false.

The main reasons it defaults to false appears to be that it better matches the general interface on Linux, but also, when pasting via middle-click in Linux, we'll do the right thing (e.g. see bug 801391 comment 0).

In any case, I believe this is now fixed by that bug.