Disable Open URL on Middle Mouse Click in Firefox 3 Beta

I recently began using the Firefox 3 Beta 4. Overall, I am very impressed by it's performance, but I encountered a new feature that I wasn't crazy about. When I use Firefox, I always click links with my scroll wheel in order to open them in a new tab. Firefox 3 has a nifty new feature that when you click the scroll wheel while not hovering on a link, it will try to load your clipboard contents into the browser as a new URL. Problems arise when you don't have a valid URL on your clipboard and the Firefox just throws an error:



Needless to say, for someone who clicks the scroll wheel a lot, the presence of this error message gets tiresome rather quickly. Luckily for me, disabling this option is very simple, though it requires some playing around with Firefox's internal settings.

1. Open the Firefox browser and direct the browser to: about:config
2. Firefox 3 will display a warning about changing your configuration. Tell Firefox you know what you're doing by pressing the button labeled 'I'll be careful, I promise.' This will bring you to the Firefox configuration screen.
3. At the configuration screen, there is a huge list of tweakable settings. The one we're looking for is 'middlemouse.contentLoadURL' - The easiest way to get to this value is to use the 'Filter' search at the top of the configuration page. Just type in something like 'middleMouse' and you'll see the configuration page filter out the other results.
4. Once you locate 'middlemouse.contentLoadURL' you'll want to double-click that line, which will cause the line to go bold and will change the 'value' to False.
5. You're done. I told you it was easy.

As I said, Firefox 3 is great. It's definitely ready for prime time, from the use I've gotten out of it so far. It seems to run a lot smoother than FF2, and uses much less memory. If you're interested in trying it out, check out Mozilla's download page here.