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MSDN Blogs > Larry Osterman's WebLog > Blogging messes up my IE address bar.
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Blogging messes up my IE address bar.

Blogging messes up my IE address bar.

28 Jul 2004 5:54 PM
  • Comments 13

When writing my blog, I end up putting a lot of links to stuff on the net.  To get the links, I navigate to the page, and select the link in the IE address bar and cut&paste it into Outlook’s compose form (sometimes I need to open in a new window to ensure that I have a good link, but…).  It works pretty well, except for one drawback…

Apparently, it appears that when you highlight a url and copy it to the clipboard, the control that IE’s using to run the “Address” combo box decides that the copy-to-clipboard action was SO important that it needs to add the URL being highlighted to the list of sites that comes down when you open the combo box.

Since I use that combo box as a sort-of “shorter-than-favorite” bookmark list, it means that the list quickly gets filled up with junky urls that I don’t care about.  It can get very frustrating, especially since the list in the combo box is so short (about 40 entries) – the sites I care about quickly get dropped off the list and the address bar combo box is useless.

FWIW, Firefox doesn’t do this, but I’m not yet ready to switch…

 

 

Comments
  • Phil Renouf
    28 Jul 2004 12:07 PM
    Keep one IE window open that you don't paste anything into and make sure that when you close your IE windows that 'clean' window is the last one you close. That should keep your dropdown list clean. I had the same annoyance as I use the dropdown menu the same way you do and this has worked for me for a while.

    Phil
  • Larry Osterman
    28 Jul 2004 12:29 PM
    I've been considering doing just that, thanks!
  • Phil Renouf
    28 Jul 2004 12:32 PM
    No worries :)

    It also works for keeping your window size if you don't use full-size windows and have a tendency to resize IE windows for some websites, another annoyance I run into.

    Phil
  • Daniel Jin
    28 Jul 2004 12:47 PM
    this is what I do, I use regedit to export the list that I want to a file. whenever I need to reload my "quicker than favorite" list, just merge the keys back in. clean and quick, and don't have to worry about ever forgetting to close the browser windows in the right order.
  • Philip Scott
    28 Jul 2004 2:15 PM
    Firefox has an extension that lets you send just about anything to a "note." I'll commonly just select some text, right click and send to a note. It includes the text copied along with the url that I pulled it from
  • Mat Hall
    29 Jul 2004 1:03 AM
    Firefox is teh r0xx0r, and you should switch immediately! Apart from the odd "IE only" site (mostly banking) it copes with eveything you throw at it, is more standards compliant, more configurable, and just an all-round well thought out app. I only wish I could use it at work...

    Some neat things about it:
    * Bookmarks can be assigned a shortcut acronym -- I have mine set up so typing "lo" into the address bar takes me to your blog, "/." takes me to slashdot, etc. (The shortcuts can also be passed parameters.)
    * Typing something in the adress bar does the IE thing of popping up a list of matching URLs, but it goes one better by showing the page title in the list.
    * Tabbed browsing.
    * A proper download manager.
    * The bugmenot.com extension!
    * Less erratic behaviour than IE. :)
  • Larry Osterman
    29 Jul 2004 7:25 AM
    Yeah, but Firefox doesn't support activeX controls and it doesn't do NTLM authentication, both of which are needed to work on or corporate network :(
  • Mat Hall
    29 Jul 2004 10:34 AM
    Use both, then. I mean, it's not like you can actually get rid of IE anyway (at least not without a lot of tedious fiddling), and I keep it around in case of emergencies. There's an extension for Firefox that will open a link (or the current page) in IE from the context menu, so when you get to something that needs IE it's child's play to switch to it...
  • Romirez
    6 Aug 2004 12:57 AM
    FYI, Firefox does support NTLM authentication. (well at least I am 99% sure it does)
  • Larry Osterman
    6 Aug 2004 8:04 AM
    Romirez, it may, but it doesn't use the logged in user's credentials - every time I try to connect to a site that requires authentication it pops up a dialog box.
  • tom
    12 Aug 2004 8:29 AM
    Has anyone experienced problem with IE when you click on the drop-down box that holds previous URL's?

    Anytime i open a new instance of IE and click on the drop-down box there is a huge delay.

    any ideas?
  • deniz mert edincik
    23 Aug 2004 3:17 AM
    hmm interesting task, if it was *legal* to patch, I would attach to it with my debugger, find where it adds copied URL to list, and nop it :) (all should take less than 10 mins)

    but it is not I think :)

    So use firefox :)

  • Larry Osterman s WebLog Blogging messes up my IE address bar | bar stools
    19 Jun 2009 2:48 AM

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