One of the really useful features of Firefox in the past was the ability to click the middle mouse button anywhere on a browser page and have the URL in the clipboard load in that window. For some reason it stopped working some time back and I don’t know why. Here’s how to enable it again if your Firefox has stopped obeying your middle finger.
- Open “about:config” in a new browser tab or window.
- Search for “middlemouse” and find “middlemouse.contentLoadURL”. Set it to true if it’s false.
- If that preference isn’t there, create a new one by right clicking and creating a new boolean value. Type “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” into the box and press return.
- A new value, set to true by default, will be created.
- Now try copying a URL and middle-clicking it anywhere on this page. Try http://ocaoimh.ie/ for good luck!
8 replies on “Middle click your urls again in Firefox 2”
I’m a Paste & Go 2 man meself. 🙂
You can change it in your prefs too I think. Or maybe if you use Tab Mix Plus. It’s not that difficult.
I wonder why your middle click disappeared. Mine hasn’t…yet…so this is good news. I love it, though I sometimes have trouble with the hyperscrolling wheel on my new mouse. It wants to MOVE not click easily. 😀
I’m a Paste & Go 2 man meself. : ))))
good article thanks !
I’ll tell you why it went away. For the vast majority of people, this is not the expected behavior when middle-clicking anywhere on the page. Doing so is supposed to autoscroll.
The super annoying part is that no matter what you had selected, it would paste that into the address bar and if it wasn’t a url it would just to a google I’m feeling lucky on it.
I always thought it would make more sense for the middle click action to only occur when your mouse was over the address bar itself, at which point it would replace the url entirely or something.
Thanks, As a Linux user, I found middle-clicking to paste a URL anywhere in the page to be the most annoying feature ever.
Middle click is pasting in X-windows, so when you are trying to paste text, and are just outside of the text box and firefox tries to open it as a URL, it is frustrating.
So your post helped me…but for the opposite reason, I couldn’t figure out which setting turned it off 🙂
THANK YOU!
You made my day.