Dave Winer, who is now using a mac for many things, is having some trouble with the latest release of Firefox, version 1.5 (rc2):

I’m using the old version of Firefox on my laptop, and it confirms my impression that they took a feature out of the browser in the latest release that I want back.

If you single click on the URL in the address field, the whole thing is selected. That’s the old, correct behavior. The new behavior is to give you a caret and make you manually select all the text. But it’s so easy to select part of the URL if that’s what you want (when exactly do you want that, btw). As a blogger selecting URLs in that bar is on the path to my linking to something, and I fight against anything that makes that path longer. The Firefox guys just did that. Why?

I figured out the solution. It turns out the Mozilla guys did not totally alter the functionality Dave is talking about. Rather they just swtiched the default. In versions of Firefox prior to 1.5 there was an entry in the config (about:config) called “browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll,” which was by default set to True. The only change in 1.5 was to set it as default to False. Not sure why that makes sense to them, but in any case Dave, all you need to do in 1.5 is change that back to True and you’re on your way.