Customize “Single Click Select All” Feature in Mozilla Firefox Addressbar

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, you might have noticed that whenever you click in the addressbar, the whole text is selected by default. Its a good feature and very handy when you want to clear the addressbar to enter a new URL but sometimes you might want to disable it. Why? because if you want to edit a URL in the addressbar, you’ll need to double-click to edit it.

So it depends upon what are your requirements. This tutorial will help you in disabling this feature and after following this tutorial, you can edit the URL by simply clicking in the addressbar, it’ll not select the whole text any more.

So here are the steps:

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1. Open firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll confirm, click on I’ll be careful, I promise! button.

2. Now type SelectsAll in the Filter box. It’ll show 2 entries:

browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll

clickSelectsAll” would be set to true and “doubleClickSelectsAll” would be set to false.

3. Now to disable the auto-select feature, either double-click on “clickSelectsAll” or right-click on it and select “Toggle“. It’ll set its value to false.

You can set Firefox to select the whole text in the addressbar by double-clicking in it. To do so, either double-click on “doubleClickSelectsAll” or right-click on it and select “Toggle“. It’ll set its value to true.

Disable_Single_Click_Select_All.jpg

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4. That’s it. Now Firefox will no longer select the whole text when you click in the addressbar but if you double-click, it’ll select the whole text for you.

Published in: Mozilla Firefox

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

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  1. Is there a way to have Google select all the text in its own toolbar? I find it really annoying to have to manually select the text (which can be really long), delete it and type the new one.
    Many thanks đŸ™‚

  2. Thanks for this information about:config, clicking in address bar in Firefox! This website contains a lot of valuable stuff for us Firefox users.

    Chris

  3. Thanks!
    I had exactly the opposite, and I didn’t like it; so I did the opposite of the suggested – SelectsAll – true, doubleClickSelectsAll – false.

  4. This is great. For me, it was the other way around it. I wanted to enable clickSelectsAll, which was disabled by default.
    Exactly what I needed! Thanks.

  5. Sylvia, I can’t answer your question but I have a tip you might find useful:
    Click into the bar, then press Ctrl+A to select all the text at once. (Works almost everywhere by the way)

    And thank you aksvg.com! I also needed the opposite and it worked perfectly.

  6. This was what i was looking for! Thanks for the tip! The about:config part in firefox is really nice

  7. you know of any addon that gives you the ability to check / de-check all the check box’s if theres not a “check mark all” option?

  8. Thank you very much for this helpful tip. I’m using Firefox on Ubuntu. I had to double-click the address bar each time I wanted to enter a new address. Now I can just click and enter a new address.

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