Comment 5 for bug 371151

On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 16:04 +0000, Bruno Girin wrote:
> OK, I think I misunderstood your description. Based on your
> clarification, would the following be a correct description of the
> problem?
>
> Steps to reproduce:
> 1. Go to a web site in firefox (e.g. www.foo.com)
> 2. Copy a different URL from another application (e.g. www.bar.com)
> 3. Paste the copied URL by pressing the mouse's paste button in the
> main window of the browser

Exactly!

> Expected result:
> The browser overwrites the current URL with the pasted one and goes to www.bar.com

Sorta...

This is a major regression from previous versions.

The old behaviour was that if you pasted into the URL entry box it
appended; if you pasted in the area of the open canvas, it overwrote.
This made sense because it allowed you the choice between appending and
overwriting depending upon where you were in the firefox window when you
pressed the paste button.

> Actual result:
> The browser appends the pasted URL to the existing one and tries to go
> to www.foo.comwww.bar.com

Not exactly. It ignores the paste entirely outside the browser URL bar
but over the canvas. When within the browser bar, it appends EVEN if
the entirety of the current URL is selected. Normally if the entirety
of a value in a dialog box is selected, a paste is treated as an
overwrite.

This basically means that you cannot "wander" over to the firefox window
and do anything useful with the URL already in your paste buffer. You
have to visit the browser first, select the entire URL (loosing anything
in the current paste buffer) and hit <-- (aka Backspace) to remove the
URL. You then have an empty URL box in which to paste the new URL.

This is extremely annoying when you're trying to catch a message from a
text based installer or something similar which does not stay around
long.

Hope this clarifies the problem and why it's serious.

Regards, Bevis.