I like enabling the autoscrolling feature of firefox, which is available under Preferences->Advanced->Browsing. Unfortunately this conflicts with the firefox's behaviour of treating anything pasted into the browser window as an URL to be loaded. Here's a simple demonstration of this: 1) enable autoscrolling 2) middle click in the browser window to bring up the autoscrolling icon 3) scroll a bit by moving the mouse around. 4) middle click again, anywhere but over the autoscrolling icon After following the above procedure, firefox will try to load whatever you had last highlighted as an URL. In my opinion the correct behaviour should be to turn off the autoscrolling icon. Also: I cannot reproduce it, but it happens fairly often that autoscrolling just plain stops working after loading a web page. Middle clicking will cause firefox to attempt to load whatever was last highlighted as an URL, the autoscrolling icon will not appear at all. It happens to me at least once a day, so anyone who regularly uses firefox's autoscrolling feature should be able to confirm that this happens. When it does happen, just scrolling the mouse wheel up and down makes autoscrolling work again. I've solved these problems on my end by going to about:config and toggling middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false. I think this should be the default when autoscrolling is enabled, since it greatly reduces the amount of times firefox does the "wrong thing," by trying to load an URL that you didn't want it to load in the first place. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.enable autoscrolling 2.middle click in the browser window to bring up the autoscrolling icon 3.scroll a bit by moving the mouse around. 4.middle click again, anywhere but over the autoscrolling icon Actual Results: attempted to load whatever was highlighted last as an URL Expected Results: turn off the autoscrolling icon Portage 2.0.51.19 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.3.5, glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1, 2.6.11.6 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.11.6 i686 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 1700MHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Python: dev-lang/python-2.3.4-r1 [2.3.4 (#1, Mar 10 2005, 18:18:11)] dev-lang/python: 2.3.4-r1 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r6 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.6.3, 1.9.4, 1.5 sys-devel/binutils: 2.15.92.0.2-r1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.10-r4 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.8.1-r4 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -pipe -s -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -pipe -s -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks sandbox sfperms" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--sort-common -s" MAKEOPTS="-j3" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://jove.eng.yale.edu/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X a52 aac acpi acpi4linux alsa apache2 avi bash-completion berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 bzlib cdparanoia cdr crypt cups curl dga dio divx4linux dv emboss encode exif fam fbcon ffmpeg flac foomaticdb fortran ftp gdbm gif gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 imagemagick imlib jpeg kerberos ldap libg++ libwww lm_sensors lzo mad mikmod mmap mmx mng motif mozilla mp3 mpeg mysql ncurses network nptl nptlonly nvidia ogg oggvorbis openal opengl oss pam pdflib perl pic png posix python qt quicktime readline real rtc samba sdl sharedmem spell sse sse2 ssl svga sysfs threads tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts usb xine xml2 xmms xosd xpm xv xvid xvmc zlib" Unset: ASFLAGS, CBUILD, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
Jim: We neither develop Firefox nor do we have the ressources to forward minor bugs or feature requests upstream. Please have a look at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ Maybe you find an existing request, maybe it's up to you to open a bug there. Please reference the relevant bug url here.
There is an existing bug report on mozilla bugzilla, here it is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216899
UPSTREAM issue.