Worlds Colliding Violently

I’ve been using Firebird since the first builds were available for Windows and Linux, and Mozilla (SeaMonkey) for far longer. One of the things that always irritated me about both products, however, was the fact that the Linux clients acted different from their Windows counterparts, in regards to middle-clicking.

Before I continue onward, I should say that I mostly understand why these differences exist. X-Windows has a fundamentally different method of copying and pasting than Windows or Apple systems; you can select text to place it on the clipboard, and middle-click to paste it. I won’t go into how irritating this can be, especially when you want to select text to replace with clipboard text (the act of selecting text blows away what you already have on your clipboard, making your effort futile).

That said, here is how I use Firebird middle-clicking on Windows:

1. Find a link I want to open in a tab, and middle-click on it. The page loads in a new tab. 
2. When I’m done with a tab, I middle-click on the tab itself in the tab bar to close it. 
3. If I accidentally middle-click in the page, nothing happens. This is expected behavior to me. 

Instead, this is how Firebird under Linux worked (and works, by default):

1. Find a link I want to open in a tab, and middle-click on it. The page loads in a new tab. 
2. When I’m done with a tab, I would attempt to middle-click on it in the tab bar, but this would do nothing. So instead, I would have to click with the secondary mouse button, and select “Close Tab” from the available selections. This is much slower than a middle-click. 
3. If I accidentally middle-clicked in a page, it would attempt to load whatever was on my clipboard. That is to say, if I had “www.ibm.com” on my clipboard, it would load IBM.com. If I had a non-URL on my clipboard, such as a SQL query, it would still try to load that as a URL, and then give me an error when it can’t. The best part is that if it did load a URL, and I was in the middle of filling out a form (read: buying something online), I’d potentially have to start over again, or risk re-posting to the previous page.

Needless to say, steps 2 and 3 on Linux annoyed the crap out of me. Fortunately, there is hope.

Several builds ago, the “about:config” feature was added to Mozilla and Firebird, letting you tweak every setting the browser has to offer (be wary, it’s a long list!). Fortunately, I was able to find the controls that caused the behavior I was seeing, and change them. If you’re on Linux, and want to change this behavior, here are the steps to follow:

1. Type about:config into the address bar. 
2. Scroll down in the huge list to section beginning with the letter M. 
3. Find the entry middlemouse.contentLoadURL, double-click on it, and change the value to “false”. 

Ta-da! Now steps 2 & 3 listed above work on Linux the way it works on Windows. As an added bonus, if you want the ability to paste your clipboard contents on Windows with a middle-click, you can change the middlemouse.paste option to “true”. Thanks to these two tweaks, my Firebird builds act exactly the way I want them to, across two platforms. Go, Firebird, Go!

August 21st, 2003 | Tags: middlemousemadness | Category: Mozilla | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed