Firefox clipboard demon
January 6, 2006 10:19 AM   Subscribe

Help me exorcise FireFox's obsession with my clipboard!

Firefox seems to input "keyword:(clipboardcontents)" whenever I double-wheel-click on blank space on any page. What's the deal? It took me quite a bit of troubleshooting to even figure out that this was going on, I'd have portions of comments copied and all of the sudden be taken to pictures of detainee torture or some random political website. Sometimes I would be redirected to files with no extensions... really quite random. I have never even used the "keyword:" functionality in the address bar, so it was doubly baffling to discover that was occuring.

The only reason I found that to be the case was because I had copied my previously abstract description of this problem, triggered the same behaviour and saw the Google page loaded up with a "Malformed Request" error and the address bar filled with "keyword: My ridiculously lengthy explanation...". Sad, I know. I've scanned for malware and other problems with AVG/HJT, but don't have anything of the nature afflicting my system.

Is this standard behaviour, or should I start removing my extensions one by one to discover the culprit?
posted by prostyle to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
Best answer: Is the double-wheel-click on mouse button 3? I noticed this when I upgraded to 1.5 on my linux machine. Since mouse 3 is used to paste things from the clipboard, Firefox would do a search of whatever I had in the clipboard. If that is indeed the problem, I fixed it this way:

1. type ‘about:config’ in the URL bar of the browser
2. find the preference named ‘middlemouse.contentLoadURL’
3. left click on the value and toggle it from ‘true’ to ‘false’
posted by nakedsushi at 10:22 AM on January 6, 2006


Response by poster: Thank you!
posted by prostyle at 10:26 AM on January 6, 2006


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