Whenever I have used firefox in Ubuntu, one usability issue I faced is that it does not select or highlight the URL in the address bar when clicked. I used Windows for most of my life and I feel lazy to double click on the address bar for selecting the URL. I know that sounds a bit strange but that’s fact.
So I decided to fix this in Ubuntu since Firefox is an application which should not bother about the operating system, specially when it comes to usability. I started debugging by look at the preferences but it was of no help. So I followed the below mentioned steps to make this happen.
- For advanced options, type about:option in the Firefox address bar. It might should you some warning that it’s not a good idea to change the settings, but that’s just a precautionary message as long as we know what we are going to do.
- In the Filter bar type “select” to filter out the options which deal with select related stuff.
- You will see an option called “browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll” in the filtered results. Notice that it’s value by default is set to false.
- Change it’s value to true by double clicking on the option. And you will see the value changing from false to true. (See the screenshot below)
- Just close this tab and it will store the changes automatically.
That’s it and now you should be able to select the complete URL on just single click as you were able to do in Windows.
Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla
