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] 60 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Huh? Firefox does this though. Highlight an address and right click then select open in new tab or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That doesn't work in many cases, like the example in the screenshot.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

IP adresses are pretty edge case yeah. I dont know if that should even be supported. The "example.com" does actually work tho, its just if you only include ".co" in your selection, it doesn’t recognize it as a URL even tho .co is the national TLD of Colombia. But all that really needs to change is to support all existing TLD'S and maybe IP addresses if there is community interest in it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think .co versus .com is the relevant factor. I can select xample.co by itself, but not as a substring of http://www.example.com. The rules seem so arbitrary and context-dependent that it behaves more like a dice roll than a usable feature.

If a selection to URL feature cares about TLDs, IP addresses, or text beyond the selection range, then it's operating at the wrong abstraction layer. (well, technically Goto foo has a couple lines of code to [bracket] bare IPv6 addresses, but that's not core functionality.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

In such cases, you can just highlight and drag the text to the address bar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

www.example works, but www.exampl doesn't. Perhaps there's a minimum character count to trigger it...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

maybe because example is a tld?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

it's not a publicly registrable, but it's reserved by IETF/IANA for use on e.g. local networks or for documentation and is technically a valid tld.

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

this list doesn't include reserved TLDs

[–] clearleaf 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I ran into this not long after seeing this post. This site disables links and the options aren't there. I find the context menu is pretty strange in general. But the problems it causes are small and easy to move on from so it's never really questioned. It honestly seems to have a mind of it's own sometimes. Not nearly as bad as the windows explorer context menu though.