Up next
Author
Tags

For some reason, Firefox started to display a blinking cursor, like web pages I have been viewing were editable. Thinking that some errant plugin was causing this behavior, I manically disabled a few I had recently installed. However that didn’t fix the problem.

Good ole Google to the rescue.

Firefox has a ‘feature’ that lets you select text with more visual feedback. I guess the little one must have been hitting keys and turned this on.

Turning it off is easy! Press F7 to turn off caret browsing.

Alternatively, type “about:config” in the URL area, then filter for “caret“. Change accessibility.browsewithcaret to “false”.

22 comments

  1. Where was the ffox product manager when this was put in?
    >Alternatively, type â??about:configâ?? in the >URL area, then filter for â??caretâ??. Change >accessibility.browsewithcaret to â??falseâ??.

    This ‘hidden feature’, which fails too many usability principles (I’ll list 3 here):
    – Nothing obvious firefox help about this
    You’d have to guess it’s an accessibility feature.
    – State of this feature is invisible, nothing changes in the status bar

    – No menu shortcut to turn it off.

  2. Where was the ffox product manager when this was put in?
    >Alternatively, type â??about:configâ?? in the >URL area, then filter for â??caretâ??. Change >accessibility.browsewithcaret to â??falseâ??.

    This \’hidden feature\’, which fails too many usability principles (I\’ll list 3 here):
    – Nothing obvious firefox help about this
    You\’d have to guess it\’s an accessibility feature.
    – State of this feature is invisible, nothing changes in the status bar

    – No menu shortcut to turn it off.

  9. Thanks, I must have activated this by accident, you helped me very much here! What a feature…

  10. Thanks, I must have activated this by accident, you helped me very much here! What a feature…

  11. Thanks Dave! This was SOOO annoying as I like to use my arrow keys to scroll down web pages and I couldn’t with the caret browsing on. It was like hitting the END or HOME key and it was frustrating. I guess my little guy must have pushed F7 and turned it on, many thanks!

  12. Thanks Dave! This was SOOO annoying as I like to use my arrow keys to scroll down web pages and I couldn’t with the caret browsing on. It was like hitting the END or HOME key and it was frustrating. I guess my little guy must have pushed F7 and turned it on, many thanks!

Comments are closed.

You May Also Like

PowerDNS flexible, fast DNS Server

I’ve recently been testing/installing PowerDNS for a web hosting provider. Man am…

Microsoft Office 2007 New Formats and your Apache server

If you upload those new fancy-shmancy file formats to your web server…

Outlook 2003 or 2007 Won’t Save Hosted Exchange Password

For many people using hosted Exchange services, password saving problems could plague…