this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Firefox

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After using Chrome for a decade and switching back to Firefox, one feature I missed was the ability to right-click and Go to [url] directly, for any selected text that vaguely resembles a URL.

I made Goto foo to approximately replicate Chrome's behavior in Firefox, but it would be nice if no extension were necessary.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Netscape, then Mozilla, then Firefox had this feature on middle-button-click for literally decades. Firefox devs killed it years ago, despite howls of protest.

You could literally highlight any text, anywhere, and a middle-click in the browser window would navigate there. It was awesome. Basically a web equivalent of X-windows' middle-click paste feature.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can enable it in about:config

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

No you can't. The code was changed years ago to only work if the text in the PRIMARY buffer "sort of looks like it might be a URL".

That defeats the whole point of the feature. If someone has written "go to example.domain, it's amazing", without bothering to make "example.domain" a link anchor, or even prepending "https://", then there's no easy way to actually visit the site. Previously, I could just select the text I wanted, middle-click into a browser window, and hey presto. Doesn't work any more.