November 30, 2005
The super fast, slick and sexy Firefox 1.5 came out recently. It’s everything I could have asked for, almost. The major annoyance I had about it was that they changed the configuration of the middle click! Maybe it’s only for non-Windows machines, but now, by default using the middle click will paste whatever you had in the clipboard and then search for it or load some page with that phrase in it.
This behavior is annoying because I mostly used middle-click on tabs to close the clicked tab without even having to raise the tab into focus. However, Firefox 1.5 doesn’t seem to want to let me do that and instead, loads a page. Luckily, despite my temporarily weak google-fu, I found a fix for it:
- type ‘about:config’ in the URL bar of the browser
- find the preference named ‘middlemouse.contentLoadURL’
- left click on the value and toggle it from ‘true’ to ‘false’
How about ctrl-tab! On the Mac, ctrl-tab is broken! WTF is that!? I NEED TO SWITCH THOSE TABS, PRONTO! I’m actually not that happy with this release, a redesigned preference pane is not a step forward for me…
YOU found?! And how’d you figure out where to look and what to look for?
In reply to the previous poster, do you mean switching between tabs? I think this is fn-ctl-up-arrow or fn-ctl-down-arrow. I don’t remember for sure, but I’m pretty sure that was the same in 1.x.
Ok fine YOU pointed it out, but I would have figured it out myself =P I don’ tilke the new preferences either. It reminds me of the Internet Options menu in IE.
i’m sticking with the old one, till i reformat i guess
Dubya: Yeah, fn+ctrl+up and down switch the tabs as well, but ctrl-tab used to work in 1.0.x, as it does in the windows versions. It worked for a few minutes in 1.5 as well, but without me changing anything it has stopped working…
Got to give that middle finger something to do – otherwise it’ll just go around offending people.
thanks for the tip! mine was acting odd (windows xp). sometimes it’d do what i wanted it to do (duplicate tab), and other times it’d search for whatever was in my clipboard.