Comment 30 for bug 353318

I disagree about disabling it by default. The common use case for this feature is where an URL is contained in a page text without a link (this is frequent e.g. in blog comments). For most cases, you can simply double-click on the URL, followed by a middle click (though it would be a nice feature to be able to open the page in a new tab).

Without this helpful feature, you would have to manually open a new tab and then move your mouse to the URL field and insert the text by middle-click there. Note that you cannot use Ctrl-V to do that. It is also not possible to easily insert the URL into the current tab's address bar, because you would first have to empty it. Double-clicking for selecting all text and pressing del/backspace won't help, as it overwrites the clipboard's content.

The security concerns are IMO indeed valid (I think it even happened to me at one time), but this can easily be fixed by allowing only valid URLs (but allowing for a missing http://), maybe additionally disabling the feature in close proximity to input fields.

As for the claim in comment #17 about only a minority wanting this feature: Can you back this up? Ben Bucksch in your reference certainly doesn't state that. And it obviously _is_ handy for the frequent situation I described above.