Firefox's Least Useful Feature

If you type "foo" in Firefox's address bar and press Ctrl-Enter, you get Shift-Enter gives you, and Ctrl-Shift-Enter gives you

I'm sure there's someone in the world who wants those shortcuts.

But I have never needed them. I have, instead, about a zillion times been peacefully typing a Quick Search and pressed Shift-Enter by mistake, usually because my search string ends with a quoted string and I'm still holding Shift down.

Like all normal humans, I use "g" as my Google Quick Search. So I might, for instance, type

g autoerotic "hydraulic shovels"

...then press Shift-Enter by mistake, and thereby try to go to http://www.g autoerotic "hydraulic shovels".net/.

Is there something in about:config to disable these shortcuts? I can't find it.

UPDATE: As per Avery Morrow's comment below, this problem is indeed now fixable, with the updated version of his extension. Yippee!

10 Responses to “Firefox's Least Useful Feature”

  1. emrikol Says:

    I personally LOVE Ctrl+Enter. That was the main reason I never used Mozilla Phoenix over IE, until they finally let me use it. I am the epitome of lazy!

  2. Daniel Rutter Says:

    Of course, you can get the same functionality slightly slower by just typing [domainname without suffix] into the address bar and pressing Enter, That'll give you the first Google result, which is practically certain to be what you want.

    This takes longer, but also saves you from going to a lame domain parking page at when you've forgotten that what you actually wanted was or .org.

  3. shimavak Says:

    I think this one extension will do what you want it to do:

    But there may be a more elegant solution available by means of this addon:

    It should allow you to remap other commands as well, but it doesn't seem to always unassign the previous keybinding.

    Either way there should be a better way of making it work, but the best alternative I can think of would be to compile your own copy of firefox without the (arguably) silly keybindings.

  4. Daniel Rutter Says:

    ClumsyFingers would be perfect, but it doesn't work with Firefox 2; Keyconfig doesn't seem to know about the special address bar shortcuts at all.

  5. ats Says:

    Yes, I find this behaviour extremely annoying too...

    I don't think there's a nice way of disabling it, but it's not too difficult to do, since all the UI behaviour is written in Javascript. Here's what I did:

    Have a poke around in your Firefox installation directory and find chrome/browser.jar. Extract this into a new directory (either using the Java jar program, or any Zip implementation), and open content/browser/browser.js in a text editor. Search for "canonizeUrl", which is the function that does the URL-mangling. After the end of the switch statement and before the "if (suffix)", add the line:

    suffix = "";

    Jar up the content directory and replace the existing browser.jar with it. After restarting Firefox, you should find that Shift-Enter does the same as Enter.

    I'm sure someone who's more familiar with the Mozilla codebase than me could figure out how to do the above from an extension, but it works for me for now...

  6. evilspoons Says:

    I use ctrl-enter all the time! I find it much more useful to simply press ctrl-k to stick the cursor in the search box to search google, and leave the address bar (ctrl-l) alone unless you have an address to type in.

  7. Daniel Rutter Says:

    I have eighteen other Quick Searches that I regularly use (all of which are affected by the shift-enter problem, of course), so I've disabled the Google search box. The basic "g" Quick Search is still the one I use most often, but even if I had the Google box there for those searches, it'd still be wasting space the rest of the time.

  8. shimavak Says:

    Actually, if you're heading into the browser.js file, you can just comment out the call to canonizeUrl(aTriggeringEvent, postData);. It would seem that it is only used to add those little bits to the end and beginning of the URL.

    Good thinking on that though ats!

  9. g-lock Says:

    The Ctrl+Enter shortcut's usefulness is diluted somewhat if you do a fair bit of browsing in a country code TLD (e.g. .au). Not sure if there's a shortcut for, but it woudl probably involve dislocation of fingers.

  10. avery Says:

    I updated ClumsyFingers, it should work now. The main reason I wrote this extension is so that you wouldn't have to muck around with internal Firefox files every time you installed or updated Firefox.

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