Earlier today I got zapped by what I considered a “bug” in Firefox 7 (and now today, 8) when I copy and pasted a URL to Bob Tisdale’s blog into a short post this morning. Thanks to a new “feature”, the http:// no longer displays in the address bar in Firefox7:
While the feature is supposed to add the http:// back when copy/paste work is done, it doesn’t always work, hence I made a link in a blog post today without the http:// which prompted a slew of “dead link” complaints.
This “feature” is annoying, and I set out to find a way to solve it. I found it, and thought I would report on it for the benefit of readers and whoever might happen upon this blog via search. Here’s the fix:
- Type about:config in Location (address) bar, press Enter
- Filter for browser.urlbar.trimURLs (or scroll until you find it)
- Right-click or double-left-click on that phrase and toggle it to false
The http:// should then show up again, as seen below:
Now maybe readers can help me with a vexing problem in Windows 7.
I use the new search feature a lot in Windows Explorer. Problem is the search engine takes off and starts a search often before I can complete a finished phrase or word set. This prevents any new input until the initial search completes. Or if I make a mistake in typing, same problem. Ditto when searching for emails in Windows Live Mail.
Does anyone know of a way to make the Windows 7 search feature only start after pressing Enter? Or maybe add a bit more delay before the search engine starts on is own?
I’ve searched for weeks for a fix, to no avail.
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You can type “filename:” (without the quotes) followed by your search term to search the names of files. Slowish, but it works. Is that useful?
@Pete H
I downloaded and installed UltraFileSearch without any issues.I have Kaspersky AV installed.
WExplorer search tool: Just ignore the search results you get while your are typing your keyword. When you add new characters, the search restarts. It isn’t a problem, just different. The advantage is you might find what you are looking for without having to type the whole keyword.
@Anthony
“I use the new search feature a lot in Windows Explorer. Problem is the search engine takes off and starts a search often before I can complete a finished phrase or word set. This prevents any new input until the initial search completes. Or if I make a mistake in typing, same problem. Ditto when searching for emails in Windows Live Mail.”
Interesting. You’re not getting good advice probably because you have a problem that others can’t duplicate so they don’t understand what you want.
I can continue modifying the search term after the search begins. The priority is low so it can get a bit slow in accepting new keystrokes if there are a lot of higher proirity tasks at that instant competing for and winning the bids for a CPU timeslice but it definitely does not wait for a search to complete before changing the contents of the search term window.
I’d guess you’ve got something going on that is blocking normal preemption due to very high priority. Device drivers are the usual culprits and in this case I’d suspect the mass storage device driver. Do you have anything that is out of ordinary in way of the mass storage that is being searched? Perhaps something you added onto the system yourself?
REPLY: The behavior is common to all Windows 7 machines I have, with differing hardware. I have thousands of files on my machines, so search takes a long time. On a virgin machine, it acts as you describe. – Anthony
I thought this problem was down to an annoying glitch on my new desk top. Thanks for the heads up Anthony. I’ll get my other half onto the problem because when it comes to PCs I’m lost if it doesn’t switch on..
Thanks for a very useful fix – I hated the truncated URL’s in Firefox – they don’t look like URL’s at a glance, never mind the problem pasting them.
I reckon that there are layers of software such as operating systems and browsers (to name but two) that have matured as far as they usefully can – further change is pointless and often counter-productive.
[SNIP: Site rules require a valid e-mail address. -REP]
Why would you need the http:// ?
I am surprised nobody has suggested Google Desktop
http://desktop.google.com/en/?ignua=1
If you want to search, just hit ‘Control’ twice and then fill in the popup search box, then choose whether you want to search your machine or the web it does both and a lot faster than Windows. It takes a while to index your files but after that just keeps itself up-to-date in the background.
I don’t use Windows explorer to search. Instead, I press the start button and start typing in the box that says “search programs and files”. Type in whatever you want to do or whatever you are looking for. Although there is no delay, I find this to be easier to use because it searches everything.
Anthony,
thanks for the firefox info — it’s been annoying me for a while but never enough to do anything.
On an unrelated vein … if you do a lot of copy and paste via firefox, you may end up as I did having to use notepad to remove all the formatting before copying it again.
I’ve just found that someone has finally updated the “Copy plain text – eve” addon which allows a “ctrl-shift-c” to copy text without any format.
Filesearchex works wonderfully for me. See link http://download.cnet.com/FileSearchEX/3000-2248_4-75165408.html Windows 7 search functions are pathetic.
I use google as my primary search engine. Upon making it default search, the question was asked, “enable search suggestions?” Or somewhere along the way it was asked.
Perhaps do a search on how to, “disable search suggestions in Windows 7.”
the_Butcher says:
November 9, 2011 at 4:14 am
> Why would you need the http:// ?
To specify the protocol to use in to access the URL and to tell the browser that the next element of the path is the hostname where to access the ultimate target.
Otherwise, there’s ambiguity in knowing if the target is HTML, FTP, or just a file, and ambiguity about whether the first element is a host name or file name.
Firefox is trying to be “user friendly” while keeping up with the other browsers.
One thing I don’t get is that on my laptop (at least the Windows 7 OS, I haven’t checked Ubuntu today), I’m running Firefox 7.01. It displays unadorned URLs, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/CoCoRaHS, but I tried various flavors of highlighting the whole URL. Whenever I copied (why does Windows need that ^C? Unix’s X11 doesn’t) and pasted the result, I’d get one with http:// prepended. Personally, I find that behavior rather annoying, if I scan something with the mouse what I see highlighted is what I expect to paste.
Ah well, just more dumbing down for the masses. And confusion about why Anthony doesn’t get that prepending. I even tried restarting without plugins, same behavior. Ah well. Firefox started nagging me about 8.0. I suppose I’ll try it out.
HaHa! Get Firefox 2.0 & you won’t have the problem…
Thanks for the Firefox tip! Done!
As for searching in Windows 7, I believe the behavior you describe is by design. Windows starts searching as quickly as it can to speed of the searches. HOWEVER, it should never stop you from continuing to type in the search box. There are three main reasons why that would happen: 1) Your disk is not indexed( or the index is corrupt), or 2) You’re searching in too big a space, or 3) Your computer is a “dog” :).
Given an adequate computer, you can fine tune your searches rather easily and not have the problem that you are describing.
Click on the “Start menu globe” and then type “index” in the search box – without the quotes. When the results come up, select “Indexing Options”. You can tailor where you are going to search by clicking on “Modify”. Make sure you select the “Users” folder. Once you have tuned the folders click on “Advanced” and select “Rebuild Index”. Then leave the machine on and walk away, it will take a while…. Don’t let the machine sleep until it’s done. Now even thought the searches still begin as you type, the computer should not show you the processing Icon and stop you from typing. This all assumes that while searching in Explorer you are looking in your whole disk or in your whole User folder. By design, Explorer only searches within the Folders or Libraries it is looking in at that moment.
Also, when searching you can select “Type:” from the filters (in blue below the search box) and the select something like “email”. Then when you type your search text it will only show you emails, not other files. This will NOT speed up the search though, it just narrows the selection.
Best,
J.
Anthony,
Here’s another vote for Agent Ransack. When we “upgraded” to Windows 7 here at work, is was immediately obvious that the new search functionality was a retrograde step. Agent Ransack does the job extremely well – give it a try.
My solution? Use Opera. I recommend it.
Been using Opera since version 6 under Win 98 SE days and current version is 11 something.
Just sayin …
please don’t anyone recommend google chrome or google desktop or ANYTHING google because every single one of their “free” products is just spyware designed to track you all over the internet and build profiles on you. google is not your friend.
(and facebook and twitter aren’t either)
James Reid says:
November 8, 2011 at 11:09 pm
Your suggestion helped me, James. I recently “had to” install IE9 from IE7. (i.e. I didn’t want to, but from a hurried shut down the install got started from an errant mouse click.)
With IE9, I started to get too many suggestions from queries that I would make and that contained the web site name when all I wanted was the web site that I had been going to for years.
Thanks, Warren
@Anthony
As another poster did I was going to suggest checking into the indexing. I don’t think the pre-search happens if indexing isn’t enabled and if the index is incomplete or corrupt lord only knows what problems that might cause. Hit the start button and type ‘index’ into the search box to get the options for it.
In any event something else is wrong as someone else mentioned as well what you are seeing is not the way it is supposed to work. The disk search is high priority task and the search term undating is a low priority task but the former should not be hogging up so many resources that the latter screeches to a halt.
beng says:
November 9, 2011 at 5:19 am
> HaHa! Get Firefox 2.0 & you won’t have the problem…
Don’t laugh – my main system (I’m typing on it now) runs SUSE 10.1 and the update server evaporated years ago. Some of the stuff here is so old that a huge number of upgrades would have to occur before I could even think of upgrading from Firefox 2.0.0.5!
I can’t shut this down – it updates various weather things, WUWT things (BTW, the ENSO meter data source didn’t upgrade this week, so it’s stuck at -1.1 until Monday or so), and various other things.
I bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with Windows 7 and I co-installed Ubuntu Linux so I’d have something to run the various things that no longer run on this tired system.
I might find time next year to replace this one. Hey – at least it has a RS232 port to talk to my Vantage Pro weather station every 20 minutes.
I was very surprised to read this post. I have been using Firefox 7 on my Mac since it was released and the “http://” ALWAYS shows up.
As far as Firefox goes, I have yet to have an issue with copying and pasting with the http:// hidden. It has worked as intended for me each and every single time so personally I won’t be changing the settings, but all the power to you for finding a fix.
As for the windows search issue, I would suggest Linux 😉
I would suggest rolling your computers back to XP. There is much wrong with 7.