HowTo: Stop Firefox from loading URL w/ middle mouse button

[tturrisi]

Scene:
You have a 3 button mouse or a wheel mouse & occasionally when using the middle mouse button to scroll a Web page you push too fast or too hard & you are surprised to see some Web page load that you did not intend to load.

Cause:
Firefox default setting for midle mouse button will load a Web page when pressed if cursor happens to be over hypertext. (a nuisance when using the mouse wheel to rapidly scroll a Web page)

Solution:
1. open Firefox
2. in address bar type: about:config
3. locate line: middlemouse.contentLoadURL
4. double click the line to change from true to false

[Kingsley]

thanks. your guide helped me figure out how to fix the annoyance in my opera browser.

[tzulberti]

Thanks, that solved that annoyiance in firefox...

[enopepsoo]

This is far from an annoyance to me. Middle clicking is great in firefox. I am in the habit of opening links in new tabs. You can also close a tab by middle clicking it!

I know this middle click works well in Windows as well, but I love Linux' use of middle clicking for copy / paste. that is very handy (although it is not 100% consistent.

[dmizer]

i love you man. can't count how many forum posts i've lost as a result of that little middle click "feature".

[tht00]

Yeah, I also use the middle-click a ton. I used to use mouse gestures to open new tabs (and closing tabs) until I found the middle-click gem.

In any case, does anyone know what causes the very strange behavior in firefox in other environments? I've noticed it on some of the school's Solaris machines -- a middle click on a tab won't close it, but rather, open some (sometime completely random) website. (Does anyone know what I mean?)

I've also noticed this in the KDE environment under Mepis... why is it not consistant?

[kotti]

Why not just check "Use autoscrolling" from options/advanced/general? That's the first thing I change when I install Firefox.

[george_apan]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I use a laptop touchpad and the middle click is mapped to the right-top edge which I accidentally pressed all the time. This was a major annoyance for me.

[Antipodean]

Thank you very much, this also fixes the annoyance in non-standard installations of Firefox (Swiftfox etc.) and Seamonkey where middle clicking on a tab button causes the browser to try to load the contents of the clipboard rather than closing the tab.

For those who may be interested here is the user.js entry for this.

user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false);

[respyre]

In any case, does anyone know what causes the very strange behavior in firefox in other environments? I've noticed it on some of the school's Solaris machines -- a middle click on a tab won't close it, but rather, open some (sometime completely random) website. (Does anyone know what I mean?)

I just noticed this myself--middle clicking seems to do a Google "feeling lucky" search for the currently selected, or most recently selected text. Now that I see a pattern to the seemingly random URLs that were loaded, I can see how it'd be a useful feature.