Firefox has many settings that are not available through the standard “Preferences”
dialog. However these can be configured navigating to the “about:config” address.

In that list we can find two useful options related to text selection, that has different
default values depending on the platform (Windows, Linux, Mac).

The first option “layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation” controls whether the selection
when you do a double-click or use ctrl+arrows to select text, stops at dots, slashes and
other symbols. Enabling this option is specially useful when trying to change some part of
the URL in the address bar. Otherwise the entire URL is selected, thing that can still be
done triple-clicking on the address.

This option is selected by default in Windows version of Firefox, but is not in the Linux
version. There is a long discussion about how it would be in future versions.

The second option “layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word” is related to the selection
of surrounding spaces when double-clicking on a word on a page text. I think this option
should be always set to false, because sometimes is really annoying specially when copying
and pasting usernames and passwords. This time the value I consider more useful is the
default in Linux and the opposite happens in Windows. No exact idea of what happens on the
Mac’s world ;-).

Posted: March 29th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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