Firefox on Linux: fixing the middle-click disability

Firefox is awesome with making my mouse's middle-click do useful stuff. Like middle-clicking a link opens it in a new tab, in the background. And middle-clicking right on a tab closes it. Great stuff.

But for some reason, the linux version of Firefox does something spectacularly stupid when you middle-click on a bit of normal web page. It assumes that whatever is in the copy buffer, a.k.a. clipboard, is a URL that you want to go to. At least, in all the versions of Fedora in use at my work this is the case.

So I'm often scrolling a web page with my mouse wheel, engrossed in whatever I'm reading, and suddenly the page is replaced with some stupid crap like String.com (coz I copied the word "String" just before).

Anyway, enough about the pain. Here's the pain killer:

- go to the URL about:config

- scroll down to the entry middlemouse.contentLoadURL

- double-click it to toggle it to "false".

Done. You will never again see the error "www.{.com is not a valid URL".

Love, Deuce