this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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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] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Netscape, then Mozilla, then Firefox had this feature on middle-button-click for literally decades. Firefox devs killed it years ago, despite howls of protest.

You could literally highlight any text, anywhere, and a middle-click in the browser window would navigate there. It was awesome. Basically a web equivalent of X-windows' middle-click paste feature.

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

You can enable it in about:config

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

No you can't. The code was changed years ago to only work if the text in the PRIMARY buffer "sort of looks like it might be a URL".

That defeats the whole point of the feature. If someone has written "go to example.domain, it's amazing", without bothering to make "example.domain" a link anchor, or even prepending "https://", then there's no easy way to actually visit the site. Previously, I could just select the text I wanted, middle-click into a browser window, and hey presto. Doesn't work any more.