Forcing middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false is confusing

[Andy Smith]

I restarted Firefox yesterday and my middle mouse button behaviour changed. I had previously changed middlemouse.contentLoadURL to true in order that a middle mouse paste would load the URL in the clipboard. When I looked, that had been changed to false.

I changed it back to true, but this change did not persist past a restart of the browser. Searching the web for information about this found nothing related to middlemouse.contentLoadURL, and just a few recommendations to make settings in user.js instead. Irritating, but OK. But that doesn't work either.

Eventually I found /<email address hidden>/defaults/preferences/ubuntu-mods.js

pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false); //setting to false disables pasting urls on to the page

I do not understand why this is considered worth overriding in a system file.

This was pointed out to me:

 https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2004-October/000296.html

This may have been less surprising to me if I had been experiencing it since 2004, however I did not experience it until the last upgrade of firefox:

Start-Date: 2012-01-28 20:57:32
Install: xul-ext-ubufox (0.9.3-0ubuntu0.10.04.3), firefox-locale-en (9.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.2)
Upgrade: xserver-xorg (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), language-pack-en-base (10.04+20110204, 10.04+20110931), xserver-xorg-video-all (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), libicu42 (4.2.1-3, 4.2.1-3ubuntu0.10.04.1), ubufox (0.9~rc2-0ubuntu2.1, 0.9.3-0ubuntu0.10.04.3), language-pack-gnome-en-base (10.04+20110204, 10.04+20110931), xutils (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), firefox (3.6.24+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1, 9.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.2), xserver-xorg-input-all (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), firefox-gnome-support (3.6.24+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1, 9.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.2), x11-common (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), xorg (7.5+5ubuntu1, 7.5+5ubuntu1.1), firefox-branding (3.6.24+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1, 9.0.1+build1-0ubuntu0.10.04.2), language-pack-en (10.04+20110204, 10.04+20110931), language-pack-gnome-en (10.04+20110930, 10.04+20110931)
End-Date: 2012-01-28 20:58:04

My preference is obviously different to the person asking for this setting to be changed, so I am biased towards it not being done at all. But if it must be done then is it possible to find a less confusing way?

I'm running 10.04.

ii firefox 9.0.1+build1-0ubunt Safe and easy web browser from Mozilla
ii firefox-branding 9.0.1+build1-0ubunt Safe and easy web browser from Mozilla - transitional
ii firefox-gnome-suppo 9.0.1+build1-0ubunt Safe and easy web browser from Mozilla - GNOME support
ii firefox-locale-en 9.0.1+build1-0ubunt English language pack for Firefox
ii ubufox 0.9.3-0ubuntu0.10.0 transitional dummy package
ii xul-ext-ubufox 0.9.3-0ubuntu0.10.0 Ubuntu-specific configuration defaults and apt support

Oh, I thought I better add: it's possible this has always been the behaviour in Ubuntu's firefox and I haven't noticed as it's one of the first things I change. What may have changed is Firefox overriding about:config / user.js with the settings from the extension.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Note that we don't intentionally force this preference, but it gets overwritten due to a bug in Firefox (preferences that are changed by a user back to the upstream default after being overridden by an extension are forgotten on shutdown).

We did originally have a workaround for this, but it changed the preferences API in such a way that it completely broke Firefox Sync, causing a bogus value to be sent in the Accept-Language header - which caused major sites (including Google) to be presented in the wrong language.

We made the decision to regress this bug to fix the Firefox Sync bug instead, as we considered that bug to be much more serious than this.

[Sam_ (and-sam)]

Possibly dupe bug 921565

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.