I use Firefox exclusively and this is the single most annoying change they made for no apparent reason. So annoying.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?votes=133
I hate that behavior. When I click in the address bar, it's because I want to edit the URL. If I want to go somewhere else, I'll open a new tab, or use a bookmark, or click a link on a page. In the rare case that I want to type a whole new URL, but keep the same tab, I can easily triple-click or [Cmd]+A before I begin typing.
I would wager almost anything that this is the case for the vast majority of regular users because most of the ones I've interviewed (N = 31) for a uni UX study didn't even know how to read URLs for the most part - especially not after the ? query part.
I'm with you on this. But to me the worst annoyance is how it tends to revert to a previous URL when the new URL fails to load, either because it truly failed to load due to an error or because it timed out while I'm walking through breakpoints.
When I manually entered a URL, the edit should stick even if it doesn't load, dammit.
But it's difficult to click the leftmost or rightmost character to position the cursor.
So after clicking, I usually tap Ctrl+A (Cmd+A) to "select all" anyway, and then tap left-arrow or right-arrow to deselect and jump to the chosen end of the URL.
Cursor keys only junp to the end if it's selected. My keyboard doesn't have dedicated home/end keys, but I'd probably use the select-all-then-arrow trick anyway.
Unfortunately, that dumpster-fire of a bug-report/thread is a horrible abomination that shows massive hubris on the part of the developers; and I say this as a developer myself --- and one who fights against this sort of thing far too often to count. Change the defaults if you really want, but never remove the choice.
(The argument that it has "costs" is stupid --- yes, everything has costs, but they actually have perceived value in this case, unlike working on something else, often of much greater complexity and cost, that your users never even asked for in the first place!)
> it [single clicking not selecting all] was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself. The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle, taking into account all the possible pref combinations (for example under certain combinations it was not possible to select a word), and having to execute more tests for them. Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them.
Why can’t you just have both options?
> Most of the tests should then be able to run with both setups, everytime we touch something around that we'll have to check not breaking it, and so on. Yes, even the simplest pref skipping a line has a cost, and that's why they must be weighted with a benefit.
> Apart from what I already said regarding the will to unify the behavior for the more commonly found case of users moving across OS and browsers, and the cost of options in general, I'd like to explain a further reason why it's not just matter of reintroducing a pref; the change we made here will allows us to experiment more broadly with the unfocused Address Bar contents, for both UX and security reasons. Keeping browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll around would make experiments a lot more problematic, and at a certain point we may have to remove the pref regardless, because it would block landing improvements. So we'd end up causing you frustration twice. We totally understand your point of view on this matter, unfortunately sometimes changes must happen, to be able to evolve things.
Shame you cant "give the devs opinion" on bugzilla.
I don't remember it doing that before but maybe i have a bad memory
So news.ycombinator.com it goes to the right of https:// and www.reddit.com it goes to the right of https://www.
Madness.
FWIW, this is fixed in Firefox 3.6; you should probably upgrade.
However I can relate: When I tried to use chromium I got really annoyed that clicking and dragging the selection with the mouse up or down would not automatically select the complete text in front or behind the cursor in the url bar.
Firefox still allows to do that under Linux. Hopefully they will not change that as well.
I don't really care about consistency with other browsers - I don't use other browsers very much. I care about consistency with everything else on my desktop.
(It's not just about the option - I didn't even use the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll option myself. The clickSelectsAll=false behaviour - the one that was removed - had been the default on Linux.)
This may just be laptop/touchpad users complaining, and mouse users not comprehending what the big deal is.
The one that grinds my gears is that when you select the URL bar in Chrome it shifts the whole thing to the right, so if you want to edit text you have to reposition the cursor, you can’t just click, pause, then click again.
No longer shows up here, because it's now 135 votes.
Now both firefox and chrome dont allow you to change the adress easily to manually remove amp.
I wonder if some Firefox developer was bribed
I don't see what the single-click functionality has to do with removing something from a URL (as almost all users would perform selection with click-and-drag or a double-click). The primary use case would be for adding text.
You can set browser.quitShortcut.disabled=true in about config starting with Firefox 87.
Coincidentally, when Mozilla's blog post about shipping a big cookie separation feature was on the front page recently, the first thing I thought was "but when will they let you disable CTRL+Q? It'd be so much easier to do than this." In the age of Chromium, issues like this will lead to death by a thousand cuts for Firefox. The cost of switching is marginal for most people, as Chrome has become too well-architected as a browser which ends up connecting you to Google. I myself was almost tempted to switch because of this and other relatively minor issues that ended up snowballing together, and I'm a person that makes a deliberate effort to like Firefox. I have to wonder why nothing changed in 2002, when so many people were making so much noise about this.
I don't think I can explain the extent to which this simple papercut has been vicious and painful to me.
So many times, I've started writing some long post in a text field and accidentally lost it due to pressing some wrong keyboard shortcut (oops, you pressed backspace outside a text field! oops, we bound this key to 'reload the page', oops you closed the form by pressing ESC!). It's always a particular type of sinking feeling to have to start writing all over again.
Now there are extensions for this, and some of them even work. But what's my natural instinct when I have data in a text field I really don't want to lose because I would feel terrible losing it?
Well, ^A ^C and go paste it in a notepad, maybe even finish editing it there.
... and then Firefox quits, maybe because my layout switched between AZERTY and QWERTY by accident, maybe because my finger slipped between A and Q. And I get to stare at my desktop, crushed and defeated, having lost my data at the exact worst possible time...
I was seriously starting to consider maintaining my own Firefox fork, and I _cannot thank you enough_!
My FF is configured to delete all history upon exit, so I have lost SO MANY interesting browsing sessions over the years due to CTRL+Q!
Thank you very much for finally resolving this!
Thank you so much fpr actually fixing bugs!
If my impression of Mozilla is correct you must have both done the work and possibly also fought hard to be allowed to merge it.
(Now, if any Mozillan feel inspired I'd love to get my real extensions back, particularly TST without top tab bar and also Scrapbook.)
Another favorite of mine: `browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab` set to `false`. This lets me cmd-w as many times as i want but it won't close the window I have open.
Only drawback (maybe) is that every open project in VSCode warns when trying to close the entire app.
https://superuser.com/questions/1318336/how-to-disable-ctrlq...
Wayland probably providers tighter coupling, but then you'll need cooperation with applications... GNOME has gone toward this direction, but applications not developed by GNOME basically ignore their efforts to make applications and window manager feel like a cohesive whole.
Firefox is still a fantastic browser but it can be frustrating in many small ways.
Looking at you, every random GitHub project ever.
Anyway, that taught me not to report something that's not a game-ender. Which is probably what they want too, so I guess we're all in some sort of equilibrium.
(edit: _jal beat me to it.)
Few things are as infuriating as taking the time to write a great bug report just for it to be ignored or autoclosed.
The idea of a bug tracker is to track bugs in the product. If the bug still exists in the code, the bug in the tracker should still be open.
Sometimes the overhead of that maintenance work isn't worth it, particularly for a bug that's been explicitly categorized as 'low priority' for years. The fact that a bug can stay at low priority for years is a reasonable sign that it's not too important to spend a lot of effort either tracking it or fixing it.
With that point of view, closing the defect as unfixed and explaining the reasons why is in some ways more honest than just keeping the thing open ad infinitum just because somebody, at some point in the past, thought there was an issue. And if closing it was wrong, you'll run into the issue again, and can either re-open the defect or submit a new defect with a back link to the original, and an explanation of what's changed that's brought it back into relevance.
(Personally speaking in the last few months, I've gotten several good solutions from reading the commentary on defects that were closed as unfixed.)
When I got this role, I instated a culture of never closing old bugs, despite some of my managers wanting me to do that many times, and one of them even going on a rampage once and closing some of them (which I reversed as soon as he left). Some of the bugs are still encountered by new users, unfortunately, but are not fixed yet since they are not critical enough or have enough impact compared to other bugs.
To his credit, that manager also came up with a more-or-less effective formula to rate the bugs according to their importance based on several criteria. Which helps a lot with the upkeep and with planning ahead. And occasionally, one of the very old bugs will be critical enough for a large enough group of users that it will rise up in the ratings to be fixed.
I also set aside time for bug grooming once in a while, closing bugs which were fixed or are no longer relevant. Unfortunately. at this point we are a small team with only 2 experienced devs (the rest are very good but are relatively new graduates and/or without a lot of experience and require supervision) and close to 5000 open bugs and requests, and a steady stream of new feature requests and bug reports. We also have too many internal users for our own good.
It's tough. But the dude abides.
But in game development with dedicated QA I feel such scrubs are necessary because when they're not done you end up wasting days just confirming that old bugs can no longer be reproduced and flagging them to be closed. Most bugs which linger are symptoms of other bugs which have been addressed.
If they're still there they will almost certainly be found again by QA the moment you close it. In fact, old bugs often even have newer duplicates.
We're on our 3rd or 4th now.
I'm lost for words. Can't you just put a tag and park it? What is this obsession about keeping the issue count low?
The rationale was that they only did that sporadically every few years, when some other change mooted the issue. If they ignored feature requests on a schedule, it would better manage external expectations.
See also, The CADT Model (but copy-paste the link in to your browser bar to avoid a bit of unrelated commentary):
As much as it pains me (I’m still tracking multiple bugs I reported) to say this, but all tickets with no activity for some reasonable time period must simply be closed. Things are _already_ out of control.
No, any open source project needs someone (or multiple people) triaging tickets; either keep them open and make sure they are implemented in a reasonable time, or close them as a 'wontfix'.
Of course, then you'll have the issue of people opening up new tickets for the same thing, and the triagers will have to either point them to the old ticket, or the discussion about whether or not to do it has to be restarted.
I've literally had issues I filed that the maintainer verified as an actual bug be closed due to lack of activity. I can understand that an unpaid maintainer doesn't have the time or motivation to fix it, but closing issues you know are valid seems insane to me.
This is likely a separate ticket, but Firefox ignores macOS' built-in text replace which I use for expanding text like my email address.
On another note, the comment uses IntelliJ as an example. Wow, that was 17 years ago! Happy to see my favorite editor be around for so long.
"Nearly half my age," said Emacs.
But, I've since switched to intellij for Java (and later, lightweight editors like Sublime Text for JS, until a while later JS finally got modules and editors added more support for JS), and nowadays I'm using it for everything; I'm currently managing a 200KLOC application (it's too much but my employer isn't hiring, sigh) in at least four languages (JS, PHP, TS and Go, it's an older application and a rebuild I'm working on), and intellij has no qualms with it whatsoever.
I even set it to PHP 5.2 mode so it warns me when I try to use `[]` to initialize an array.
What do you think is the biggest difference between the two?
It's funny to look at how many editors one comes across over the years. My first one was Borland C++ as a kid. Then came a mix of Visual C++ and Bloodshed Dev C++ during high school. During university I tried a bunch of things but mainly nano, gedit, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. In my early career (2013) I finally got into Vim and haven't looked back since.
I did try out Rider a little over a year ago. It was really good and I'm impressed with some of its features. But it wasn't enough to make me switch.
It is older!
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219972
My favorite bug, 18 years old, closed without replacement.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505089 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=7018785
If a program doesn't have the feature you like, it can always be added -- 17 years later.
Similarly you can post a very specific question on a forum and it's possible the person that will answer it casually many years later as if they were just continuing the discussion wasn't even born when you posted the question.
These extremely asynchronous interactions between strangers are something unique. I wonder what's the current record for longest lived discussion thread like this, or the question-answer pair with the longest interval. A bit like the open-ended questions in academia that are answered decades later.
Not sure I like the idea that a "feature request" can be "fixed". It's a feature, not a bug. It's a request, not some sort of obligation of the development team.
Still though, it's good to see a process work over a 17 year long period, in an industry where things oftentimes seem to be thrown out in a matter of a few years.
The entire 802.11 blobs story, is about persisting "if we knew how the magic FPGA works we'd fix this" stories.
> I'm going to take this bug so maybe someday I can do it. Way too hard for now, but it would be very nice to have.
Now that's persistence!
In the JetBrains software I use it all the time but only cause it's clickable.
Wish they'd focus on battery use! It's so crazy un-optimized. Run your next Zoom call on Firefox and put your laptop on your lap to test... Or just watch the battery meter plummet vs. other browsers.
