Fix Firefox address bar Enter bug

I love using Firefox (can’t wait to see Servo up and running!). Now, for some unknown reason, my fresh installed Firefox 52, 53, 54 (Stable, Beta and Aurora/Developer version) in a new macOS iMac computer is having very annoyingly:

[Command+L]google.com[Enter]

When you press Enter, Firefox should open https://www.google.com/. However, nothing happens. You press Enter frantically yet nothing happens, until you reach over to your mouse, click on the -> arrow to the right of the address bar. This behavior persists even if you start Firefox with the -safe-mode without any add-ons.

I looked all around the Internet, through Firefox bug reports, and forums, but nothing helped. After one day of digging through, I found a work-around and a fix:

Workaround

Before pressing Enter, just press Space.

[Command+L]google.com[Space][Enter]

Pressing Space triggers the search in the Address bar, then pressing Enter executes the top action in the search from the address bar: go to site.

You would’ve thought that, being a browser, going to a website or opening a URL doesn’t require any extra Spaces.

Fix

Open about:config (you still have to press Space for the first time). Look for a key called browser.urlbar.autoFill. Click on its value to set it to false, which disables the dumb extra Space requirement. Chrome has similar features in the address bar, and they did not require an extra space bar to function well, so I assume it might as well be a bug in Firefox.

Hörmetjan Yiltiz /
Published under (CC) BY-NC-SA in categories Software  tagged with Firefox  Hacking