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 Space
s.
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.