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How to stop firefox from going to a URL your most is hovering over when you type in a URL and press enter.

  • 6 replies
  • 15 have this problem
  • 16 views
  • Last reply by philipp

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When you open a new tab and begin to type a url to visit, if your mouse is hovering over any of the suggested results when you press enter, instead of firefox going to the url you have typed, it goes to the url that the mouse was hovering over.

Is there a way to disable this functionality as it is annoying when you are say, trying to access youtube or google, but then you goto a completely different page from your history because your mouse was hovering over a suggested result.

When you open a new tab and begin to type a url to visit, if your mouse is hovering over any of the suggested results when you press enter, instead of firefox going to the url you have typed, it goes to the url that the mouse was hovering over. Is there a way to disable this functionality as it is annoying when you are say, trying to access youtube or google, but then you goto a completely different page from your history because your mouse was hovering over a suggested result.

Chosen solution

apparently this is a regression in firefox 31 and there's already a bug on file for this behaviour (please don't post in bug reports, but vote for the bug if you want to see it fixed): bug #1043584

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All Replies (6)

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hello, can you try to replicate this behaviour when you launch firefox in safe mode once? if not, maybe an addon is interfering here...

Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems

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@philipp:

I restarted in safe mode with all add-ons disabled and the problem still persists. Apparently a friend also seems to have this problem.

How to reproduce (to the best of my knowledge)

1) click on url bar 2) start typing part of a url which generates many results from history 3) mouse over one of the results (usually the first as thats where the mouse is after clicking on the url bar) 4) press enter with autofilled url in url bar

What happens is say that i start typing "goo" for google.com, firefox will auto complete with http://google.com, but since my mouse is hovering over a historic google search result it opens what ever my mouse is hovering over even though the url bar says "http://google.com"

Modified by abduct

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It doesn't happen for me as long as I do not move the mouse, so make sure not to make this happen. If you have a laptop with a touch pad then this might happen by accident. I don't think that you can prevent this from happening if you move the mouse pointer, so best is to make sure that the mouse pointer is not in the are where the location/address bar drop-down list opens to avoid this at any time.

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@cor-el

That's kind of lame. Where can I file this as a bug report or feature request because this is annoying as all hell. It happens almost every time I go to use the url bar and a fix of "just don't do it" is not very good.

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This will happen all the time the mouse pointer is in a drop-down list area. Try to open the Bookmarks menu or another menu via its keyboard shortcut. If the mouse pointer is in the drop down area then that entry gets selected as soon as you move the mouse.

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Chosen Solution

apparently this is a regression in firefox 31 and there's already a bug on file for this behaviour (please don't post in bug reports, but vote for the bug if you want to see it fixed): bug #1043584