For mouse ninjas, application developers have almost made it a standard to make use the double-click as the mouse command for selecting a word (or if you’re a keyboard ninja, it’s holding down ctl + shift + right arrow key). If you notice in Firefox, however, the default behavior is if you double-click on a word, it selects the word plus the blank space after it. This actually poses a problem for me since it also affects text-input areas. Like when I have to select a word to make it a hyperlink, it always includes the blank space.

But with a little Firefox tweak, you can set Firefox to not “eat” that blank space after the word and just select the word itself. Here’s how:

  • Access the about:config page.
  • Find the layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word preference name
  • Double-click on it to change the string value to false
  • Close the about:config page/tab
  • The changes take effect instantly

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