688977 - middlemouse.contentLoadURL behavior changed

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 667340

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[houkouonchi]

Back In Firefox 3.6.x and many much older versions of firefox this feature (which was enabled by default) is extremely useful to quickly access a web-page/URL by simply selecting it and then middle clicking it anywhere on a open browser page.

It appears that the behavior was changed in that it no longer assumes a protocol (HTTP). This option as a feature makes sense so people don't automatically go to something they weren't trying to pr paste a password inside a URL, etc..; however this change of the default behavior is quite annoying with (as far as I can see) no way to re-enable the old behavior. From the behavior I can only assume this was done on purpose.

What I did:

Selected some text from a path like selecting:

mydomain.com/blog

from:

/home/username/mydomain.com/blog/

What happened:

I middle clicked in a browser window after making my selection and *nothing* happened.

What I expected to happen:

My browser to open to mydomain.com/blog.

Browser version tested:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2

As well as the nightly build.


Now if I select text that is:

http://mydomain.com/blog

Then it works as expected. I have tested this with many different protocols (https, mms, ftp, etc...) They all work.

So it looks like it was changed so it only works on what it knows are 100% correct URLs where the protocol is specified.

I can see some people possibly wanting this behavior but we really need an option to get the old behavior back as 95% of the time I used this features (also use it quite a lot for IP addresses) my copy buffer does not contain http:// and it also requires me selecting more text (http://) which is also less efficient.

I would be perfectly happy with enabling the old behavior with a non default option like middlemouse.contentLoadURL.OldBehavior = True as long as I can have the ability to get the old behavior back.