Andy Chase

While setting up a shiny new system after my recent hard drive failure, I decided to upgrade to FireFox 3.

Why in the world is the default behavior when single-clicking in the URL field to select the entire thing? A single-click in every graphical browser I’ve used since 1995 places the cursor so you can select or add whatever text you need; just click and start typing. I’ve spent the last two weeks clicking-and-typing out of habit, only to blow away the entire URL. It’s maddening! Instead you have to click once to select everything, then click again, then click a third time before it just puts the cursor where you wanted it in the first place.

Thankfully, while searching for a fix I found this FireFox tips & tricks page which clued me in to the existence of the “browser.urlbar” preference group. I decided to go exploring, and went to the URL about:config.

Putting ‘browser.urlbar’ into the filter field at the top of the huge preference list, I found two key settings:

• browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll, which I set to false.
• browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll, which I set to true.

Problem solved.