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URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 01:53
by KSCLA
I am running Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86) on Tahrpup 6.x (a version of Puppy Linux) on a Dell Latitude D430 Laptop. The "URL autocomplete" is not working.

By "URL autocomplete" what I mean is that after I visit a website such as https://forum.palemoon.org, if I then open a blank tab in Pale Moon and type, say, "palemo" in the address bar (URL bar), nothing automatically fills in. Normally I would expect any URL in my Pale Moon browser history (a URL I had previously visited in Pale Moon) containing the typed string to show up automatically. In this case, I would expect https://forum.palemoon.org to show up.

By the way, on my mom's Chromebook running Lubuntu 14.04 autocomplete works fine on Pale Moon.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 05:51
by squarefractal
Could you make a clean profile and test whether this happens?

(To make a clean profile, type "palemoon -p" on the command line.)

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 18:56
by SvenG
Have you checked your privacy settings? That tab contains two things that might be of interest:
1. you need (obviously) a history, should be used by default, if you use custom settings make sure it keeps a history. Would also make sense to not delete it when you close the browser.
2. directly under those settings you find the settings for the address bar this has to be set to use either history or history and bookmarks.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 20:37
by KSCLA
squarefractal wrote:Could you make a clean profile and test whether this happens?

(To make a clean profile, type "palemoon -p" on the command line.)
Thank you very much for your quick and helpful suggestion. As I suppose you surmised, by following your suggestion I was able to solve the problem I was having.

Specifically, I typed the command "palemoon -p" in a terminal. Then I created a new (fresh) Pale Moon profile. The I typed some random letters on my keyboard in the Pale Moon URL bar (address bar). Then autocomplete of URLs worked successfully.

Of course when I reloaded Pale Moon with my normal profile, autocomplete of URLs in Pale Moon did not work. I restarted Pale Moon with all of my add-ons disabled (which I had done prior to originally posting my problem to this forum despite not indicating that I had done so) yet autocomplete of URLs in Pale Moon did not work.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 23:31
by KSCLA
SvenG wrote:Have you checked your privacy settings? That tab contains two things that might be of interest:
1. you need (obviously) a history, should be used by default, if you use custom settings make sure it keeps a history. Would also make sense to not delete it when you close the browser.
2. directly under those settings you find the settings for the address bar this has to be set to use either history or history and bookmarks.
Thank you for quickly responding to my posting. No. I had not checked my privacy settings. I just checked them.

As you surmised I had indeed set up custom settings yet did not keep my history. Subsequent to reading your suggestions I changed my privacy setting to "Pale Moon will remember my history." Then I typed random letters on my keyboard into the URL bar (address bar) but URL autocomplete did not work. Then I chose "clear your recent history" but URL autocomplete still did not work. Then I restarted my machine but URL autocomplete still did not work.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-23, 23:46
by SvenG
KSCLA wrote:As you surmised I had indeed set up custom settings yet did not keep my history. Subsequent to reading your suggestions I changed my privacy setting to "Pale Moon will remember my history." Then I typed random letters on my keyboard into the URL bar (address bar) but URL autocomplete did not work. Then I chose "clear your recent history" but URL autocomplete still did not work. Then I restarted my machine but URL autocomplete still did not work.
Did those "random letters" match anything, that could be in the rather short history you have? To get a suggestion, you need to have a pattern that matches (like moon for the Pale Moon websites). If your history is very limited (just started or just previously deleted), there is nothing that could be suggested cause there simply is nothing.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 05:40
by KSCLA
SvenG wrote:
KSCLA wrote:As you surmised I had indeed set up custom settings yet did not keep my history. Subsequent to reading your suggestions I changed my privacy setting to "Pale Moon will remember my history." Then I typed random letters on my keyboard into the URL bar (address bar) but URL autocomplete did not work. Then I chose "clear your recent history" but URL autocomplete still did not work. Then I restarted my machine but URL autocomplete still did not work.
Did those "random letters" match anything, that could be in the rather short history you have? To get a suggestion, you need to have a pattern that matches (like moon for the Pale Moon websites). If your history is very limited (just started or just previously deleted), there is nothing that could be suggested cause there simply is nothing.
Thanks for your quick response.

I am sorry I was not merely unclear but instead inadvertently actually misleading. I did not randomly pound away on my keyboard. I was careful. By random letters I meant I would just type, say, an "a" and then delete it, then type, say, a "r" and delete it. Most of the time some autocomplete suggestion would popup in the URL bar in the "fresh" (default profile) for Pale Moon but nothing showed up at all in the URL bar regardless of what I type in my normal profile.

In other words, autocomplete clearly works properly with the Pale Moon default profile but clearly does not work with my normal profile. It's black and white. There is no grey area.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 05:43
by New Tobin Paradigm
How old is your Pale Moon profile? Was it originally a Firefox profile? In either case what version was it first generated from.

Also check about:config option browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 19:29
by KSCLA
Matt A Tobin wrote:How old is your Pale Moon profile? Was it originally a Firefox profile? In either case what version was it first generated from.

Also check about:config option browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled
Thanks for taking the time to consider the problem I described.

My Pale Moon profile is less than a month old. No, it was not originally a Firefox profile; it was a "fresh" Pale Moon profile (that Pale Moon created). I looked at browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled. It is set to "true."

Also, I am not a techie type of person. Therefore, aside from installing a dozen or so add-ons (including Pale Moon Commander) I did not play around with any hard core tech tools. I am not interested in that sort of stuff.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 20:12
by SvenG
Hmmm, so what else can it be? It works in a new profile, so it's no general problem. You said you tried disabling all your addons and that did nothing, right? If it is not addons, it should be settings (maybe changed by addons). Well you could try to reset your settings. You should be able to do that from about:support (just type that in your address bar and hit enter), there is a reset button in the top right box. If you do not feel adventurous make a backup of your profile *first*.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 21:43
by KSCLA
SvenG wrote:Hmmm, so what else can it be? It works in a new profile, so it's no general problem. You said you tried disabling all your addons and that did nothing, right? If it is not addons, it should be settings (maybe changed by addons). Well you could try to reset your settings. You should be able to do that from about:support (just type that in your address bar and hit enter), there is a reset button in the top right box. If you do not feel adventurous make a backup of your profile *first*.
Thanks for your quick response and helpful suggestion. Your assertions above are all correct. I had supposed what you conjected: it is likely that unbeknownst to me one of my add-ons changed a setting.

I followed your advice. I just reset Pale Moon. Now I will reinstall my add-ons. I hope this doesn't happen again because reinstalling and reconfiguring Pale Moon add-ons once is a minor hassle, but doing it regularly would be more than a minor hassle.

The Internet generally, as well as software like Pale Moon and Firefox add-ons, reminds me of the Wild Wild West of the late 19th century in the United States with the accompanying lawlessness and disorder. I am not in favor of some Orwellian Big Brother government agency (think Great Firewall of China) sanitizing the Internet.

But the notion of the Free Market taking care of problems justly, is absurd as well. As a Jew it probably would not suprise you that I would favor a committee of wise rabbis (Talmid Chacham) to make the rules. But here in 'merica (America) that is not likely.

In the meantime I will continue to navigage my way through the lawlessness and disorder of the Internet.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-24, 22:53
by New Tobin Paradigm
If this happens again.. I would be interested in know what is the offending add-on causing the issue as well as what setting it may have flipped.

Re: URL autocomplete not working in Pale Moon 25.3.0 (x86)

Posted: 2015-03-25, 00:02
by KSCLA
Matt A Tobin wrote:If this happens again.. I would be interested in know what is the offending add-on causing the issue as well as what setting it may have flipped.
I am guessing it might have been the following add-on (which I believe I tried and then uninstalled):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search

"Note: The change of preferences will persist even when this add-on is disabled/uninstalled."

I have a fuzzy recollection that I had the audacity of wanting to revert Ctrl+Shift+V to paste plain text. I know. It's an utterly bizarre idea. .

Frequently I copy formatted text from the web and then want to paste it as plain text into Google Docs. Why does Pale Moon violate this standard?

I am not expert or even close to one. But in my experience Ctrl+Shift+V normally pastes plain text. This is like YouTube disabling Ctrl-W which is the way I normally close tabs in my browser just like I suppose millions of other people probably do too.

By the way, ultimately I found the following method to revert Ctrl+Shift+V to paste plain text

http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=4973&p=30575

Even if there is a good reason for changing a standard, I find it difficult to think of a good reason why Pale Moon (or at least Pale Moon Commander) does not offer an option saying, "Change Ctrl+Shift+V to paste plain text" Upon hovering over that choice with the mouse pointer the user might see a text box that says, "This is handy for pasting text you copied that has 'weird formatting' (undesirable formatting) into one of your existing word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc because the text you paste will match the font size and style in your existing word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc)."

Too wordy? Not for regular people who don't normally make jokes like, ""There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't." I find that sort of joke not merely unfunny but insulting.

Pale Moon Commander lets me change its “brilliant” approach of changing Ctrl-Shift-tab from doing the opposite Ctrl-tab.

Similarly, I get frustrated when engineers cavalierly change standards- albeit relatively news ones, because the World Wide Web is relatively new- because of some brilliant epiphany or whim of theirs .

There is this tiny little company that I am sure you have never heard of that... Oh no wait, wait! It is actually one of the biggest and wealthiest corporations in the world. It is named after a red fruit that millions of people (but not observant Jews) associate with the Garden of Eden. You might have even eaten one today!

This company is called Apple Corporation. Maybe you have heard of it after all. (Heavy sarcasm). What is part of the reason Apple Corporation makes huge profits selling ordinary hardware and software? They make products that are "user friendly", that do not require ordinary people to waste their time learning all sorts of arcane technospeak (gibberish) that they neither want to learn nor should need to learn.

Pale Moon could be a slick and cool browser. But, like FireFox and Chrome, it has all sorts of seemingly little, annoying peccadilloes (that are very annoying to many of us non-techie folks) that satisfy “brilliant” engineers who either could not be bothered to spend time watching how people like real 75 year old grandmothers actually use web browsers, or think real 75 year old grandmothers should learn the engineer’s brilliant new way of doing things.

I predict that in another five to tend years Pale Moon will probably be tossed into the dustbin of obsolete tech because in the interim a browser that works in a way consistent with the way normal people think and behave will take over the market.

Just like I ditched Netscape Navigator then Internet Explorer and then Firefox and then Google Chrome, I am actually looking forward to jettisoning Pale Moon when this hypothetical browser comes on the market. I predict this will be very similar to what happened when the iPhone and Android essentially toppled RIM (maker of the Blackberry device) and Nokia.

In the meantime, despite its annoying quirks, much like my fast but annoying current operating system tahrpup (Puppy Linux), Pale Moon is the best browser I have found for my needs. Therefore, I will use it... for the time being.