Fixing Firefox Quirks on Linux

February 19th, 2006 • General, Mozilla

I’m not really sure why Firefox/Linux packagers decided to flip some options and make it different from Windows, but there are a few quirks about Firefox that can get too annoying at times. Here’s how you fix them:

• Type in the address bar about:config, press Enter, and you’ll get a list of (almost) all Firefox internal options. Now look for each of the following options and toggle them to your preference.

• middlemouse.contentLoadURL: If you’ve ever middle-clicked by mistake in some page and ended up not knowing exactly where, it’s because Firefox took the content of your clipboard, pasted it automagically in the address bar, looked up the first result in Google and went there. Ouch! You might want to disable this. Just double click the row to toggle true/false.

• middlemouse.paste: If this is enabled and you middle-click a text box, Firefox will paste the clipboard in there. But there’s a small caveat. It doesn’t matter if the text is selected or not. Normally, if there’s a selection and you press Ctrl+V, the text will be pasted to replace the selection; Firefox doesn’t do that, it just pastes the text wherever you clicked.

• browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll: This option makes Firefox select the whole URL in the address when you click it. Yes, this is minor, but still annoying.

• layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation: I spent some time looking for this one, this was the most annoying quirk to me. You know when you’re trying to delete just the directory or the query part of a URL and you press Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow to select it and delete it? Well on Linux, Firefox selects the whole text instead. This is how you fix it, enable this option and you’ll get the same behaviour that Firefox has on Windows. Nifty, huh?

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