philwilson.org

Firefox location bar doesn't work under Ubuntu

06 May, 2007

Some of the shortcut keys for Firefox on Ubuntu are different to those on Windows. The most pertinent one for me is that the <backspace> key as a shortcut for clicking the “Back” button has been disabled. This is easily fixed in about:config by changing the value of browser.backspace_action to 0.

The most annoying however is the one which appears to have no fix, and for which I haven’t yet found a Bugzilla or Launchpad entry. In fact I’m not even sure which one it belongs to.

CTRL+SHIFT+arrow doesn’t select chunks of text in the Firefox location bar. It just selects all of it. I’m very used to chopping and changing URLs by hitting ALT+D followed by some keyboard selection goodness. No more apparently. Want to take off the “/blog” from a URL? That’s ALT+D and backspace five times. Hope you can count really quickly because sometimes my fingers move much faster than the location bar updates.

See other posts tagged with firefox general usamajility and all posts made in May 2007.

Comments

Greg
06 May, 2007 at 20:58

Phil, I enjoy reading your blog, but you really have to come up with some better complaints about firefox under ubuntu. Neither Bugzilla or Launchpad will have anything on your issue since it is a pref setting.

Set layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation to true.

Oh and btw, if you are still wondering about the flash and greasemonkey problems you wrote about a while back, check my comment: http://philwilson.org/blog/2007/03/things-i-cant-do-in-firefox-without.html#6034922099684275089

Keep up the good work on the blog, I really enjoyed your wife’s poem.

Phil Wilson
06 May, 2007 at 22:34

Hi Greg, thanks for that – it works a treat.

However it’s still a completely bizarre option for the Ubuntu build to set by default (reproduced on three other machines so it’s not just me), and I found it very hard to search anything that might have been related.

I’ll try harder to come up with things that bother me in the future 🙂