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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

I've been using nightlies for a while, and the address bar seems fine to me. I haven't even noticed when it changed.

It's a central piece of user interface, so it makes sense to make it more prominent than what a '90s design of a bog-standard dropdown menu allows.

It even logically makes sense to make it like a little popover window, because when you edit the address, you're navigating to a new page, not editing a property of the existing page.

Anyway, overall it's a small issue.

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Agreed. I like the change.

I think it's a rather small change too (I've had it on nightly for a while and barely noticed it), so I don't understand why the top voted comments are complaints about this :S

One of the complains is that the select-all on single-click is anti-idiomatic for Linux and *BSD users, and when text is selected in X11 it is automatically copied. The standard way to select the whole content in a text box is to triple-click it.

I see. I'm also on Linux, but i guess i've mostly been doing ctrl+L to go to the address bar, and that's been selecting the whole text since before the change? Because i didn't notice that change...

But i understand it's frustrating to have the behavior of clicking on it change all of a sudden. I see the point of the change too (if i click on the address bar, i'd assume it's because i want to go to another site, or copy the URL, so selecting all text is convenient), but UI changes will always bother people who are used to the existing behavior.

I just don't think it's so black and white bad as some people paint it to be. And at some point i feel that harsh criticism is not constructive at all.

I also use ^L, but many times I just want to modify part of the URL (sometimes even with text from the clipboard buffer). As a web developer this change is going to be pretty irritating.

Web dev here. Simply doubleclick the part you want to change.

Unfortunately that doesn't work as it selects the doubleclicked word (after selecting the whole URL) which modifies X11 clipboard.

Don’t worry. The single click behaviour is secondarily broken in that it doesn’t save the url to your primary clipboard so you can click again (but slowly enough for it to not be a double click) to edit the url

Uhm so if I do two slow clicks I can actually edit without changing my clipboard (even when the first click renders it selected)... and if I want to copy the URL I have to do two slow clicks and then a quick triple-click. It's awful but I least I still have copy paste functionality. Thanks!

By the way, is there any workaround for the Esc issue? (i.e. a way to unfocus the new address bar)

In fact you can go straight for a confusing fast triple click to select everything and copy to clipboard. The first selects everything, second click selects and saves the word, and the third selects and saves the whole address.

No idea about escaping from anything

I'm not over the moon about the new address bar, but I don't care too much either way.

I agree it's a small issue. So I think it's really sad that Mozilla are spending UX resources on this fluff, instead of working on making the unique Firefox features better.

For example, I really wish the official container extension got some love. That could help make Firefox a lot better than Chrome, instead of making it less distinguishable from Chrome.

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