Help! My browser is "mocking" me!

Poststructural Pub
1

I just accidentaly typed an address in the URL field with an extraneous double quotation mark ("). And I was instantly redirected here:

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

In fact, I’m redirected if I type nothing but a double quote in the URL field.

I enjoy following the Sarcastic Rover on Twitter. But now I have a sarcastic browser! Is there no end to life’s indignities?

More to the point … Does anyone else get this behavior? My browser is an older Firefox. Has my computer been invaded by a sarcastic virus? Is this a known Firefox joke? It’s both funny and vaguely disturbing.

2

Dude, its not “just” your browser! :smiley:

3

It’s not your browser. It’s just that they’ve used " as one of their meta-tags (or whatever they’re called where you are). If you type " in the Google search engine, you will also be directed to the same site. I imagine it would be the same with any search engine.

By the way, I was disappointed to note that they didn’t pick up on the redundant ’ in “parent’s”. A missed opportunity, I thought.

4

Actually, it is my browser. But you’ve given me the clue I need to figure out what’s going on.

I vaguely remember configuring Firefox to do a Google search by typing a double quoted string (or non-URL string) into the URL field, then going directly to the first Google hit. So it interprets the double quote character as a Google search. And indeed, the first Google hit is the Unnecessary Quotes blog. Solved!

Oh, don’t I know it. Even the neighborhood children point at me and make snickery noises. :blush:

5

When you feed something in your location bar, depending on what your settings are, the browser performs different actions.

In my browser (is Iceape but for the sake of the argument we can safely say it is Firefox) single words are treated primarily like they are web sites so the browser automatically adds prefixes and suffixes (like http:// and .com or .org or .net etc.).
When there are more words I receive the google page for a search of those words.

This is why if I just type “chiffandfipple” I receive directly the chiffandfipple.com homepage, whilst if I type “chiff and fipple” I end up in a list of web searches of which our loved website is most likely the first result.

Your browser is likely configured to use the “I’m feeling lucky” or the “Browse by name” features of Google and thus automatically redirects you to the first result of a search query like a set of quotation marks which, as anyone can see by just searching quotation mark directly from google.com, is that funny blog you mentioned.

Now, explained how things work, if you want to change the behavior of your browser to accommodate your needs (my configuration is just one of the several possible), you should change the options of your browser. You can probably do this from your preferences menu (sadly I can’t tell for sure since I am not very familiar with older firefox’s preferences), or you can, although it is admittedly a little bit trickier, edit the preferences directly from the “about:config” settings of your browser.

So, unless you can find and change the settings from you preferences menu, type “about:config” (no quotation marks! :smiley:) in your location bar and hit enter. You might receive a warnig that says these are advanced settings and you should know what you’re doing, go on anyway.

Once the settings are listed, search, either alphabetically if you’re not in a hurry or through the built-in search bar, for the string “keyword.URL” (again, no quotation marks!) and you’ll be presented with the narrowed down search of one single occurrence.
The field is divided into four columns, namely preference name, status, type and value.
Right clicking on the entry you can choose to “modify” the string, this action opens a small dialog box where you can paste any of the following:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

For the “I’m Feeling lucky” behavior.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

For the “Browse by Name” behavior.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

For the Google search page.

Restart and you should have a different behavior.

Before going blindly through my instructions though, I strongly suggest to read the documentation page for this setting:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyword.URL

and also the documentation for the location bar:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_Search

Don’t worry, they are quite short to read.

Hope I helped, back to whistling!

Ciao :slight_smile:

6

Yes, thank you for all the details! The behavior you describe makes sense. And I’m familiar with about:config, so no problem there. :thumbsup:

7

A scary instance of reported speech in the Freesheets yesterday:

What, they weren’t real Britons? Oh, I see, the article says the wife had “dark skin tones”. Well, that fits in with the agenda of the Dacre newspaper group. The article also says, in extenuation, that the headline is reporting a statement by the French Police. Which is true, in its way. Not a nice way to report news. :imp: