GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 602196
Middle-click on main window triggers Google search
Last modified: 2012-10-07 15:26:33 UTC
When there is some text in the clipboard and I middle-click on the main window, it immediately starts a Google search with the contents of the clipboard. This is a security issue since it can leak sensitive information to Google. Even worse is the fact the search engine cannot be configured.
Agreed, there should be a possibility to configure the default search engine.
http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-3b3e36fb98ae28d4e7c9e3f9317c8144be97d7c5
Xan, Loading an URL from the clipboard is not _quite_ the same as feeding clipboard contents to Google. Perhaps we should allow the former, but not the latter.
It just passes whatever is in the clipboard to epiphany. Epiphany will search in google when the data is not an URL, same thing that happens in the entry location.
ugh, i always turned that behavior off in firefox. in my experience, most of the time when i middle-click on the window content, it's because either (a) i missed the link I was trying to open-in-new-tab, or (b) my finger slipped while scroll-wheeling i agree that being able to middle-paste a URL would be useful, but this always seemed like a bad way to do it to me. But Reinout's suggestion makes sense; if the string is syntactically a URL (or even a hostname maybe), it was probably an intentional paste
I don't like this either, but I don't think this is the point. This is a hidden preference, which is *false* by default. If you don't like it don't enable it, simple as that. It could be argued that the whole thing is pointless and that we shouldn't even support it, but that's a different issue and a different bug.
(In reply to comment #6) > This is a hidden preference, which is *false* by default. Oh! Was wondering why I hadn't tripped over it yet :-)
(In reply to comment #6) > This is a hidden preference, which is *false* by default. D’uh, I wondered how that could happen. You are right of course. I had enabled it at a time when it was safe to do so (invalid URIs were rejected) but apparently it is no longer the case. Well, my request to disable the “middle click to search engine” behavior stands, but since it’s not the default it’s a less important issue.
(In reply to comment #8) > (In reply to comment #6) > > This is a hidden preference, which is *false* by default. > > D’uh, I wondered how that could happen. You are right of course. I had enabled > it at a time when it was safe to do so (invalid URIs were rejected) but > apparently it is no longer the case. > > Well, my request to disable the “middle click to search engine” behavior > stands, but since it’s not the default it’s a less important issue. I agree that since ephy used to reject anything different than an URI in this feature we should, in theory, get back to that behaviour. I won't reject a patch that does that, although as I said my personal opinion is that this feature is basically silly.
About the Google issue, see bug 604087.
It looks like there's no more issue. Can this bug be closed?