Aaaaaahhhhh <- happy sigh

For years, now, firefox has done something strange when I tried to middle click on a link (to open a new tab) too fast, and missed, instead middle-clicking somewhere on the page. When this happened, firefox would suddenly try to navigate to a completely invalid URL. The text in the invalid URL occasionally looked somewhat familiar, though it was often blank. Eventually I began to suspect that firefox was trying to navigate to the information in the clipboard. To what point and purpose, I did not guess.

Until today. I'm not going to explain why it took so long. Maybe it didn't happen that often. Maybe I'm so used to all of the other stupid features "they" keep adding to my favorite open source programs that I just rolled with the program. But no longer. I did a little search for firefox middle click behavior and look what popped up. Based on that thread, it seems the people who made firefox thought it would be really handy to copy a url into the clipboard and middle click to navigate to it. Maybe they didn't know you can click on URLs. Maybe they didn't know you can hold the control key down, press L,V and hit enter to accomplish the same thing in the time it takes for your right hand to get halfway to your mouse. Maybe these are the kind of people that use mouse gestures. Whatever the cause, its not important.

What is important, is you can turn it off. Navigate to about:config and set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false. I can middle click all day now and firefox doesn't get call screwed up from trying to navigate to "background: #333;"

I have a feeling I am the only person I know who cares about this. Kind of like when Y100 went off the air because of those inhumane slimy bastards at radio one, and I was the only person I knew who cared. Maybe, one day, I'll maybe my own distro of Linux with custom versions of Firefox. I'll call it "F***Gnu/Linux" for correctness, of course, and the power icon will actually turn off the computer, and stray mouse clicks won't make software flip out, and I'll be able to plug in my camera and copy videos off of it, and I could ask myself questions about it without the pre-requisite hour of fruitless searching on the internet that open source people expect, and it would come with 3d drivers from the company that actually made the card, and, oh, and a fresh installation will play my damn mp3s without me having to ignore another paragraph about "non free" software. I tried reading slashdot and fighting the good fight in the self-righteous wars against patents. You know what I got? A bunch of ogg vorbis songs from Russia that won't play on the Ipod my last girlfriend gave me just before dumping me because I didn't like her dog enough, and an A in computer ethics class. I'm done with all that.

I think what I really want is a linux version of windows. Or a windows version of linux. Like, imagine if Red Hat made a version of Windows. Or if all the people who insist it should be called "gnu/linux" were accidentally teleported to mars in a freak accident.