It’s built by the distro and not official from Mozilla. This sometimes has quirks, like invalid or missing api keys resulting in location-based services not working (a plus for some folks).
Finally doing what they should have done ages ago. If you leave packaging and backporting work to distro maintainers, you’ll get whatever they have the time for, whether they’re volunteers or employees. If the results are not okay for you - package it yourself.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.
I agree with you. There was a big outcry when they changed it, granted this was quite some time ago and the young ones here may not remember, but it’s still a break from the way everything else works.
But as usual, broken stuff becomes the new normal after a while.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)?
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have a source for this? I got this same behaviour on Epiphany, Chrome, and Chromium, so it’s not just Firefox. Is there any web-browser that handles this the “correct” way?
I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.
I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)
On nautilus you can’t even click the address bar. On dolphin it still works as you say.
I didn’t even realize this until you wrote it down. That is bad. It’s the same on mobile. Consistent behavior is good. At first you select the box and then write into it. It’s good that it selects everything, otherwise you would have to select everything in order to be able to use it as the search box. It would be very annoying if it were differently.
That leads me to the question: why aren’t we using the path box to search stuff like on browsers? Dolphin even opens firefox and searches for “test” when I type just “test” into it. Why is http the default protocol?
Firefox originally followed the method that I see in Caja (and for that matter literally anything else that you click on) where the first time you click it simply puts the cursor in that location, a second click highlights the word, and a third click highlights the entire line. Since around FF78 they changed it so you have to click FOUR times to finally place the cursor where you are clicking. This is something I use multiple times every day to grab a portion of a URL, so the change in behavior is constantly on my mind.
Since around FF78 they changed it so you have to click FOUR times to finally place the cursor where you are clicking. This is something I use multiple times every day to grab a portion of a URL, so the change in behavior is constantly on my mind.
I think you’re double clicking. If you single click, it’s only 2 clicks. And in your case, if you’re grabbing a section, you can (single) click and hold.
On my system if I single-click it highlights the entire address. If I double-click it highlight the word (usually the parts between period and slashes). Triple-click highlights the entire URL once more. However I was not aware of the click-and-hold option! Thank you for that, it will certainly be helpful in many instances!
I still have the problem of grabbing something like an Amazon address, where I don’t want all their nonsense when I send it to someone, I just want the short link to the product. Unfortunately if the description in included in the URL (as it is in most Amazon listings) then the end of the direct URL is outside the right side of my address bar so I used to be able to just click towards the end of the visible URL then cursor over to the end of what I want to grab. The new behavior means that I either click, then have to wait a couple seconds before clicking again to place the cursor, or I click once then have move the cursor all the way from the end of the URL to get where I wanted. I think your method will let me highlight a small portion at the end of what I can see and then move the cursor from there, so I’ll wait and see how that works out in practice.
I guess I’ll have to try that too. I was sort of circumventing this by clicking once and then hitting the “HOME” key in my keyboard. In any case, it’s much more convoluted than it was when it worked as expected.
By the way, FF78 is when they started fucking it up like this.
There has to be some “hidden” setting to flip this to how it was before. I’ve just been too lazy to research it. Guess it’s time to get off my ass and do just that.
Hey I might have found something… Doesn’t look like there’s been an update in awhile but appears to have been working at least through FF102. github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks
I was actually just googling for disabling the address bar select-all and this came up near the top. Big surprise, there’s a lot of people that really hate this bug feature.
If you’re interested, it can also be changed in Vivaldi.
Just type “vivaldi://settings/addressbar” in the address bar, and uncheck “Select Address on Activation”, under “Address Field Options”. I strongly suggest you enable “Show Full Address” by right-clicking the address bar, otherwise it will shift the text and you will have no control over where the cursor lands.
The only other browser I use, besides these 2, is Brave, and I have not been able to find a way to fix this for it.
OK so I did remember correctly. I was using version 60-something before that and wasn’t sure exactly when it changed. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone else on the internet find a way to fix this problem. And there were a lot of really pissed off posters in the bug thread asking why if they went out of their way to add code to break this function, why couldn’t they have also taken another five seconds to give us a config setting to disable it.
Absolutely agree with you. I went over some, not all, of the “hidden settings” yesterday, and found nothing. I’ll keep on looking though, and if I find anything, I’ll certainly let you know.
Every browser I tried does that. They’d be inconsistent if adopting a different behavior.
Idk about others, but most times I click the address bar I want to either copy the address, change it entirely, or search for something. Selecting the entire text just makes sense, especially on mobile where selecting things sucks.
They all do it NOW. They did not always do it this way. Firefox is what I’ve always used, so I know they used to let the desktop handle how clicks were managed. Literally anything else on my desktop, if I click once it simply places the cursor where I clicked. And since I need to copy partial URLs multiple times a day, this change is something that constantly aggravates me. Now I have to click the address bar four times quickly in order for it to finally place the cursor where I’m clicking at. It’s not nitpicking if they intentionally changed an operation to no longer follow the rules of everything else on the desktop. Being inconsistent is not user-friendly.
If you hold down the mouse button while hovering over the address bar, that starts selecting stuff. Is there a reason your usecase isn’t covered by this?
Well, if they did it as you want it, a bunch of other people would complain they’re inconsistent because they’re the only browser that does that (today).
And what’s “everything else on the desktop”? I’m struggling to find more examples other than browsers and file managers. And a few popular file managers don’t even have editable text path inputs enabled by default, so you can’t even say this is a “rule”.
Open any document. Single click somewhere within that document. What do you expect to happen? Do you expect your cursor to be placed where you clicked, or do you expect the entire line to be highlighted? My guess is that you expect consistency in every application doing the same thing for a single click.
Just because one browser decided to change how they react, and everybody else copied that behavior, does not mean it is the correct or expected behavior. You’ve just gotten used to the difference that was forced on you, but imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot? What happens when they also start modifying the results of a right-click into something unexpected like clearing your cookies? Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
The problem is you’re expecting consistency between elements that should not have consistent behavior for having completely different functions.
A line of text in a PDF, in a WYSIWYG editor, text in UI labels, and text in an address bar all have different roles and should be expected to behave differently, idk why you’re surprised for this “inconsistency”.
Maybe because it WAS consistent until the FF devs made the choice to change it? As I said before, if they decided to change the role of the right-click to no longer bring up a context menu, would you be ok with that as well? What about the difference between clicking on text in a browser article or clicking into a textarea? Those also have different roles, so if the devs decide that a user single-clicking into the textarea should automatically select the entire field, would that make sense to you? If I click on any text anywhere in any application, I expect to get the same results, and not have to remember how every application handles that click differently. Sure if I was clicking on something other than text then different actions might make sense in different applications, but the idea of a single click on the address bar selecting everything is akin to clicking an icon on my desktop and having all the surrounding icons also getting selected – it just doesn’t make sense and it’s not consistent with a single click in any other application.
So it’s ok that it works for your use-case and screw consistency? My point is that if you say it’s ok for one application to do things their own way, it basically invites every other app developer to ignore the standards and just do whatever they want. And no, single-click selecting the entire URL shouldn’t be considered a standard, it’s just something that changed in the last few years when one browser made the call and everyone else played follow-the-leader.
By the way, you mentioned that “all” of your browsers behave the same way . I’d like to remind you that Chrome, Chromium, and Safari all use the same engine so they’re basically the same thing. I think Opera stands alone but I don’t have that installed here so I can’t check it immediately. I’d ask if anyone had checked Exploder, but who in their right mind uses that except for work-related stuff where their developers can’t write HTML, and Microsoft is probably the ones who started this mess anything since they’re well know for ignoring standards. That really only leaves four unique browsers though. Not saying you didn’t consider this already, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn’t.
If you want an example similar to an address bar, how about the current path in any file manager – I have Caja, Dolphin, and something called PCManFM here (not sure where that came from)? Once again, a single click does not select the entire path, it just places the cursor exactly where you clicked and nothing is selected. I can’t think of any other types of applications where you have some kind of a navigation bar, but that’s the closest example I know.
A single line text field in any interface doesn’t behave the same way as the single line text field in the address bar. It certainly does break conventions.
imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot
yeah, wow, imagine. different applications using different design patterns for different contexts. perish the thought!
Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
one browser did an arguably useful thing, every other browser agreed it was arguably useful, and it became a widely adopted feature? sounds ok to me. gee, it’s almost like this is how standard patterns come to be, or something…
Vivaldi does that crap too. I’m used to clicking the bar, and selecting from there. Vivaldi fucks it up by suddenly showing the “https://” part and shifting everything else to the right. So fucking annoying.
I found it annoying when FF no longer showed the http part of an address, but since nearly everything is on https these days it very rarely bounces back and forth for me any more.
Is this Mozilla just essentially offering an alternative to the Firefox snap, or is there anything actually different in this package feature-wise compared to other packages (snap, flatpak, etc)?
Because the Firefox browser is open-source, we know Firefox inside and out
Ok
Tip: you will still need to restart Firefox for the latest version.
That shows who the target group is
To state that firefox is fully compatible with flatpak is great! That is a reason to use the flatpak version of it.
Nice
It’s nice to see better performance but you could’ve just told distro maintainers what to do
Updates are fast even if you use the flatpak or distro build.
I use firefox btw
Edit: I compeltely forgot that ubuntu replaced firefox with the snap version. Is this the reason why they do it?
And, I don’t like that ubuntu replaced the distro firefox with snap but at the same time I don’t like that fedora still sticks with the distro firefox and not the flatpak version on atomics. I am nuts.
Edit2: I am not nuts! Ubuntu let’s you believe you install the apt version of firefox. Fedora shall replsce firefox with flatpak but it shall not pretend that it’s installed via rpm-ostree / dnf.
Hmm? You lose the namespace isolation, and by extension the chroot, but that’s it. It’s definitely nice to have, but to say it’s “most” of the sandboxing seems a misrepresentation. Note that some distros disable the kernel support for them by default, so that’s what they currently get regardless of Flatpak.
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