John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

Paste and don't go

Posted by John Smith on

One of the nicest minor tweaks in the latest versions of Chrome, Opera and Firefox is the "paste and go" option in the right-click context menu when you copy a URL into the address bar. Safari is on a much slower upgrade cycle though, so you would have to follow pasting the URL by hitting enter to actually load it.

This wouldn't be too bad, except that the Windows version of Safari has a bug. Try the following:

  1. Load some arbitrary page
  2. Copy and paste a different URL into the address field using the r-click menu (not Ctrl-V!)
  3. Hit enter
Rather than load the new URL, Windows Safari goes back to the original URL - unlike its OS X version and every other Windows browser. (It does do the right thing if you paste via Ctrl-V though.)

Now, I guess the usage figures for Safari on Windows are pretty pathetic in the overall scheme of things, so not many people will care. I personally don't use it that much either, but the main use-case I have is when testing pages in multiple browsers (or if I want a "clean" environment without cookies from prior testing) - and C&Ping; URLs into the address field is the main way of doing this...

I've submitted this as a bug via the Safari option, but as Apple don't seem to have a public issue tracker - unless this is part of the WebKit tracking? I haven't checked - I'm just blogging this now to have a record of the issue for posterity. Hopefully they'll follow the pack and add a "paste-and-go" option, making this bug moot.

About this blog

This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

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About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

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