Comments on: Firefox's Least Useful Feature

by: avery

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:36:01 +0000

I updated ClumsyFingers, it should work now. The main reason I wrote this extension is so that you wouldn't have to muck around with internal Firefox files every time you installed or updated Firefox.

http://gridley.res.carleton.edu/~morrowa/software/clumsyfingers.html

by: g-lock

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:34:44 +0000

The Ctrl+Enter shortcut's usefulness is diluted somewhat if you do a fair bit of browsing in a country code TLD (e.g. .au). Not sure if there's a shortcut for .com.au, but it woudl probably involve dislocation of fingers.

by: shimavak

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:41:35 +0000

Actually, if you're heading into the browser.js file, you can just comment out the call to canonizeUrl(aTriggeringEvent, postData);. It would seem that it is only used to add those little bits to the end and beginning of the URL.

Good thinking on that though ats!

by: Daniel Rutter

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:44:17 +0000

I have eighteen other Quick Searches that I regularly use (all of which are affected by the shift-enter problem, of course), so I've disabled the Google search box. The basic "g" Quick Search is still the one I use most often, but even if I had the Google box there for those searches, it'd still be wasting space the rest of the time.

by: evilspoons

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:55:34 +0000

I use ctrl-enter all the time! I find it much more useful to simply press ctrl-k to stick the cursor in the search box to search google, and leave the address bar (ctrl-l) alone unless you have an address to type in.

by: ats

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:44:43 +0000

Yes, I find this behaviour extremely annoying too...

I don't think there's a nice way of disabling it, but it's not too difficult to do, since all the UI behaviour is written in Javascript. Here's what I did:

Have a poke around in your Firefox installation directory and find chrome/browser.jar. Extract this into a new directory (either using the Java jar program, or any Zip implementation), and open content/browser/browser.js in a text editor. Search for "canonizeUrl", which is the function that does the URL-mangling. After the end of the switch statement and before the "if (suffix)", add the line:

suffix = "";

Jar up the content directory and replace the existing browser.jar with it. After restarting Firefox, you should find that Shift-Enter does the same as Enter.

I'm sure someone who's more familiar with the Mozilla codebase than me could figure out how to do the above from an extension, but it works for me for now...

by: Daniel Rutter

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:41:11 +0000

ClumsyFingers would be perfect, but it doesn't work with Firefox 2; Keyconfig doesn't seem to know about the special address bar shortcuts at all.

by: shimavak

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:59:42 +0000

I think this one extension will do what you want it to do:

http://gridley.res.carleton.edu/~morrowa/software/clumsyfingers.html

But there may be a more elegant solution available by means of this addon:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=72994

It should allow you to remap other commands as well, but it doesn't seem to always unassign the previous keybinding.

Either way there should be a better way of making it work, but the best alternative I can think of would be to compile your own copy of firefox without the (arguably) silly keybindings.

by: Daniel Rutter

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:29:29 +0000

Of course, you can get the same functionality slightly slower by just typing [domainname without suffix] into the address bar and pressing Enter, That'll give you the first Google result, which is practically certain to be what you want.

This takes longer, but also saves you from going to a lame domain parking page at thing.com when you've forgotten that what you actually wanted was thing.net or .org.

by: emrikol

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:10:38 +0000

I personally LOVE Ctrl+Enter. That was the main reason I never used Mozilla Phoenix over IE, until they finally let me use it. I am the epitome of lazy!