Recently Firefox has been pushing a more aggressive upgrade schedule. There is little doubt that they are feeling the pressure from Google Chrome, which is becoming increasingly popular and has an aggressive upgrade cycle as well.
In the last year Chrome has become nearly as popular as Firefox. Many of the recent changes with Firefox, like the shorter release cycles, make it look like it is trying to play catch up with Chrome. Perhaps desperately so. Unfortunately with release of Firefox 7 it appears they are also desperate to copy the same mistakes Chrome has made.
It is no secret that I really don’t like the way Chrome broke copy and paste in the URL field. That was a horrible decision that irritates me on an almost daily basis. When I select something to be copied I expect to have an exact copy of what was selected, altering that under the hood completely breaks the concept of copy and paste.
So guess what new “feature” was added to Firefox 7? You got it:
The ‘http://’ URL prefix is now hidden by default
And it behaves in exactly the same broken way that Chrome does.
To the Mozilla team: look, I understand that you’re concerned about losing market share to Chrome, but please, please, please don’t mimic their mistakes. Now in order to copy and paste the URL properly I have to copy everything but the first character of the hostname, then manually type in that first character then paste in the remainder. Absolutely horrible. This is one feature of Chrome that no one should ever copy, and I’d be thrilled to see it removed from Chrome as well.
If you want to no longer show ‘http://’ in the URL field, fine, but please stop breaking copy and paste.
UPDATE: Turns out Firefox has an option for disabling this “feature” ( kudos to @ozh ):
- Enter about:config in the URL field
- Filter on browser.urlbar.trimURLs
- Set the value for browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false
Not great that this is on by default, but at least there is an easy way to turn it off. Now, if only it were that easy to turn off this “feature” in Chrome.
18 replies on “Firefox Desperate To Mimic Chrome, Even Their Mistakes”
“by default” means there’s an about:config setting to hack? I hope so!
Interesting – I had never even noticed that particular “feature”, and I use chrome almost exclusively.
If Firefox really wants to keep up, in my opinion, they need to put all of their effort into speed. Speed (not just of page load – but startup, new tab open, etc) is the sole reason I switched to chrome, and the reason I can’t seem to go back to firefox, even when I put concerted effort into it. It just feels too slow next to chrome.
I haven’t updated yet, but it seems that browser.urlbar.trimURLs is the setting to look for
Just tried that and it does successfully disable that feature. Good to see an option for that. Now if only it were that easy to turn it off in Chrome.
Chrome is my main browser, but I still use Firefox for one off things. Mostly for development, I still like Firebug better than the web developer tools in Chrome and Safari.
You’re right, it’s been pretty obvious lately that the Firefox team is intent on cloning Chrome’s every move.
Just a small note, there’s a typo in the sixth (seventh?) paragraph. ‘Loosing’ should be changed to ‘losing’, as the former refers to removing restraints whereas the latter means the opposite of gaining, which I think is what you wanted to say. 😛
On a related note, have you seen how Opera handles the http:// readability argument? It doesn’t show it until you activate the URL bar (by clicking or Ctrl+L), and gracefully slides something over to show it (the URL doesn’t move). Since I’m using Opera as my browser now, I get to enjoy this all day! 😀 I do like Chrome, I just don’t use it because it’s extremely slow (CPU-heavy) on my Linux x86_64, for whatever reason.
Thanks for the typo catch, fixed.
I haven’t used Opera much, it really only gets some of my time when I’m doing testing across many browsers (which isn’t often).
Basically the reason I use it is because it far outperforms any other browser (excluding text-based ones), especially when I have >30 tabs open, which is often.
This is on a relatively slow-CPU machine (single-core 1.8), on our fast computer, Chrome is like the wind. 🙂
It’s generally understood that browsers communicate using the HTTP protocol, for those tech-savvy enough to understand what that means. So, showing the information that the browser is still using it, is just overly redundant, and unnecessarily noisy. For those not tech-savvy enough to understand what the HTTP protocol is, or “http://” (the vast majority of people), it’s not going to be missed.
Further, because it’s generally understood that browsers use HTTP as their main protocol, it makes sense to display the protocol in the browser, only when using a different protocol, such as HTTPS, FTP, Gopher, etc.
BTW, Opera also has removed “http://” from the address bar. It seems at this point ,Safari and IE are the only ones holding on to it.
The main problem here, as I mentioned in the original last line of the post “If you want to no longer show ‘http://’ in the URL field, fine, but please stop breaking copy and paste.” is that they aren’t just removing ‘http://’ from the URL field. They are also completely breaking copy and paste in the process. Saving an extra 6 characters in the URL field at the expense of breaking copy and paste seems like a really bad trade off.
Opera has removed “http://” from view while browsing, but retains normal copy/paste by showing it when the URL field is activated. This to me seems to be the best of both worlds.
Thanks for the tip. It’s a snap.
Except, the “http://” is in the clipboard object. Try it. Copy a URL, and paste it into a text field. So, copy/paste is not broken.
Yeah. That works too. I think displaying “http://” at all is still silly, but whatever makes you sleep at night. 🙂
That is the problem, not the solution. I select ‘www.google.com’ to be copied, but because Chrome and Firefox alter that behavior behind the scenes what actually gets copied is http://www.google.com/. Meaning the only way for me to copy and paste the host name from the URL field is to copy ww.google.com (note the missing w at the front), then manually type the first letter (w in this case) and then paste. This completely breaks copy and paste, since the whole premis is that it copies what you have selected, not magical additional parts that aren’t even shown to the user.
I thought I’d made these points pretty clear in this post and in the post I linked to about Chrome doing the same thing. I’ll try harder to be even clearer though since these points obviously didn’t come through enough.
That sounds like more work than “^v^
” or “s/http:////”.Meh. I’ll digress. I dig it.
I do like the way Opera does the address bar. It’s been my primary browser for probably 7 or 8 years now; I love it. 🙂
I really dislike how I have have 4 major version bumps, and not even noticed a difference