Hacker News Reader

Do not try and bend the spoon. That is impossible. Instead, only try and realize the truth - there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Eg - when you can't adapt the world to yourself, adapt yourself to the world. Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and especially technology, that way madness lies.

Eg - pick a workaround, go with it, habitualize it, then move on. Personally I like click address bar, then almost simultaneously CTRL+a. tjoff's ALT-d is awesome too, didn't know about that one.

Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and especially technology, that way madness lies.

Madness, but occasionally madness and change. The OP and his angry cohort are trading their collective sanity for thousands of mostly invisible minor improvements that make the world a better place.

I mainly use Chrome on Mac, but also hate this behavior. Yes, clicking on an insertion point, cussing, and using Ctrl-A works if I want to select the beginning of the URL, but if I wanted to do this I would have stuck with the keyboard and not bothered carefully selecting my insertion point.

Rage on OP!

Double-clicking also selects the entire address bar.

A bit beside the point but why don't you just use alt+d ?

It will perhaps feel a bit weird at first if you're used to go to the address-bar with the mouse but really, since you are going to type an address you are still going to use the keyboard anyway.

In the bug tracker discussion, they mentioned keyboard shortcuts. In my post, I mentioned I didn't want to use them. My hand is on the mouse to navigate the page, it's on the mouse to get to the URL bar, and it's on the mouse to click it. Often times I can type the URL with three fingers and three keys via muscle memory, then click the result when it pops up. That takes one hand on the keyboard, and no concentration.

Chrome on Linux is the only browser that breaks this. Instead of me having to change how I browse in every browser, why doesn't Google simply add the option to change like Firefox does?

I often do the same. I type the beginning of a URL and use the mouse to finish it off, that's why I love ald+d because I can hit it with my left hand alone (and don't need to bother the right hand that's on the mouse).

There is a balance of having everything customizable and forcing the users to adapt. In this case both Mozilla and Google have made the same call, they feel that this is how it is supposed to be on Linux - I don't think we can blame them for that.

Firefox has always been about customizability while chrome has always been about simplicity, you just don't have that level of detail of customizability in Chrome - for good or worse, that's why. If anything I'd be surprised if they did present this as an option (for every option they do get wrong that sucks but they have been doing a remarkably good job overall (in my opinion), but I'm with you on this one).

Keybindings are weird animals. I've always used Ctrl-L for that, which focuses the URL bar and selects it. I note that Alt-D will not remove focus from an existing text widget, so it doesn't work as reliably. Where does Alt-D come from? I guess it's a vestige of an earlier browser?

Also, as the OP is using a mouse action, it's worth pointing out that triple-clicking the URL does a select-all (by analogy to selecting the whole "line" in other apps).

>>Where does Alt-D come from?

Internet Explorer.

If I remember correctly, Phoenix (firefox) was the first browser to support that keybinding. The lack of support for this shortcut in Netscape/Mozilla was one of the reasons I struggled to switch away from IE back in the day. Really hated Ctrl+L as it required two hands (OK, you need two hands to type out the URL, but I was used to Alt+D dammit! :)

It is the shortcut on the first 'd' in "Address", or "A&ddress" for any WIN32 developers out there.

Bingo, that's the archaeology I was looking for. Thanks!

I usually select all by clicking and dragging upwards a bit. Works on OS X at least.

You should learn to code.

Doesn't... double clicking the URL bar solve this problem?

please don't tell me about your keyboard shortcuts, don't tell me to click three times, don't tell me to click and drag... if you're making me use your browser, let me use it the way I want to.

The problem is it's inconsistent with other platforms.

No, the problem is that Google Chrome in Linux treats the textbox the same way the textbox is treated every, other, place in Linux. Browsers in Windows are the only place that this behavior is exhibited. It's the exception behavior.

That's like saying "Chrome uses metacity instead of the OS X window decorations".

If it makes you feel any better, I'd like to be able to override the platform default so that single clicking in Chrome at work doesn't select all of the text.