The location bar should be exempt from dragging text, since most of the time you initiate a drag from the location bar, you're really trying to get rid of one selection (a full-URL selection) and start another. We shouldn't ship a release where due to a combination of this bug and bug 62495, it takes three clicks to chop off the end of a URL. Steps to reproduce: 1. Optional: enable the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll pref (close mozilla, add user_pref("browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll", true); to prefs.js, open mozilla again). 2. Select some text in the location bar, by clicking once with clickSelectsAll enabled or by some other method. 3. Mousedown inside the text. 4. Move the mouse. Result: end up dragging the old selection. Expected: end up starting a new selection at mousedown location.

*** Bug 89687 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Absolutely. If you want to drag the whole URL, you have the proxy icon for that.

Okay, 0.9.3 rather. Slashdot folks are going to bitch about 0.9.3 otherwise ;)

*** Bug 107835 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

-->urlbar

*** Bug 113337 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

See also bug 114862, "Can't change selection without deselecting first" (in general, not just in the URL bar).

*** Bug 124135 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 152674 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

FYI... this is one of the *two* usability issues singled out in this recent review (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,417201,00.asp): "Mozilla also handles selection in its URL address bar in a way that keeps messing me up—once text is highlighted, a click-drag tries to move text (even though there's nowhere you'd really want to move it). This behavior annoys when I click and drag sloppily to highlight the end of a URL in order to quickly delete it—what actually happens is I end up moving one part of the URL into another part of the URL." Problem exists on Mac too (except the Mach-O build, which I hope will keep the Linux behavior in this respect).

OS->All. This also happens on Linux.

Your're absolutely right, and my parenthesis was a bit misleading. (What makes Linux and Mach-O less aggravating is that they, at least, don't select the whole URL on first click -- cf. bug 62796, comment 6.) Marking 4xp because this is *not* how 4.x behaved, at least on Mac. Also tentatively upping severity, in view of the above quoted review. (Shoot this down if you disagree.)

Sorry about should read bug 62496, comment 6 (not 62796).

severity back to normal. this is _not_ a "major loss of function". mozilla functions very well even with this bug.

*** Bug 178886 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 179458 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 177395 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 182839 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 189576 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 212141 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 220005 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Can Firefox (Mac OS X) be reverted to *not* selecting the text in the url bar when you click on it? I find this behaviour very frustrating as if I click once, I usually want to edit a specific part of the url - not replace the url. (This is also not in keeping with the way all other OS X browsers behave)

Attached a proposed patch to fix this bug and bug #218315. This is my first Mozilla patch, someone please let me know what needs to be done from here. :)

*** Bug 252813 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 248885 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

A couple of points: 1. I don't think that setting browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll to false is a satisfactory solution to this issue because (a) you loose the ability to quickly over-write urls in the address bar (you need to manually select the url first). IE manages to allow full selection when clicking into the address bar, while still allowing partial drag selection on the very first subsequent click. (b) even with browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll set to 'false', full selection and dragging still happens in other places in Firefox (e.g. all the text fields of a bookmark's properties) because the setting only applies to the address bar. 2. Will any potential fix applied to the address bar also affect other text entry areas of Firefox? (such as properties of bookmarks). To fix it in one place but not in others would make the selection process inconsistent and confusing.

*** Bug 287476 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 327779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 348145 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I happened to get FireFox's URL bar to work like IE's text selection, and the fix was pretty simple. It seems to stop you from dragging URLs out of the URL bar, but you can still drag text in, FWIW. This fix will only affect the URL bar field (in reference to #26) - tested w/ FF 3.0. To make Firefox select the URL text like IE does, you’ll need to edit urlbarBindings.xml in browser.jar in C:\Program Files\Firefox\chrome (or wherever you installed to). If you attempt this fix directly on your machine, I would highly recommend making a backup copy of browser.jar in case you totally hose something. Anyway, search for "if (this.doubleClickSelectsAll". Add an else case after that if block (in the "mousedown" case) that goes: else { this.editor.selection.collapseToEnd(); } Then simply save the file, update browser.jar with the changed file, restart Firefox, and you should see text selection behave like IE's text selection. This at least gets it working how I want it on my system. Anyone who wants to is free to follow the process to push this fix into the source tree, but I'd probably add a user setting similar to the doubleClickSelectsAll setting if I was making the fix permanent.

Actually, better make that fix line: else if(aEvent.button == 0) { this.editor.selection.collapseToEnd(); } Then you can still right click to cut/copy the URL.