firefoxgoogle-chrometext;
In windows when I click the address bar in Chrome or Firefox, or the search box in Firefox, all existing text is selected automatically and if I type something it is typed in a black text area.
But in Ubuntu, the text is not selected automatically, and I have to select all and then type.
Is there any option that fixes this problem?
In firefox, you can change this configuration setting through the "about:config" command.
In the address bar, type in and go to:
about:config
Click on the "I'll be careful, I promise" radio button. And input in the following query into the filter:
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Double click on the entry to toogle its value between true and false. Select "False" if you want to place the cursor at the insertion point, and select "True" if you want to highlight the entire address bar on a single mouse click.
Here is a link to an article that gives some more useful "about:config" hacks:
Type about:config in you search bar as below
You'll then have a humourous notification box come up in the middle of the browser telling you the following:
What you'll be agreeing to is that you'll be able to modify values of certain Firefox variables which change the overall user experience (so I strongly recommend you don't modify anything you don't need/know about).
Once you've clicked on "I'll be careful, I promise" the following search bar and list will come up:
Within the searchbar look up keyword and you should have the entries in the screenshot below
Lastly right click on keyword.url and click Modify and change it to whatever search engine you want, the example I've given here is DuckDuckGo (replace DuckDuckGo with any other search engine of your choice):
For those interested/wondering the ?q= at the end of the URL you post (as far as I know) is just how search engines determine the query required to be sent to the search engine.
Just click on the triangle to the left and a drop down list will give you a choice of what search engine to use.
If your search engine isn't already there you will need to add it manually by clicking on the Manage Search Engines option at the bottom of that list of search engines and it will open up the following window:
Once there you simply click the Get more search engines... URL in orange and you can choose from a wide list which sites to add to your list so you can have them in your right toolbar at the ready.
Hope this answers your question.
Edit: I recommend users have a look at Dan's answer below, not exactly what was asked but still a very useful feature, well worth a read.
Best Answer
On my system, when I press F6 the contents of the address bar in Firefox are selected, just as you wish. The same behaviour with Iron (a derivate of Google Chrome).
To select the text (if any) on the search bar on Firefox, then you can press F6 and then Tab.
About the "black text area" I don't know; maybe you mean "blank text area", meaning that once you start typing, the (selected) text is substituted?
In Opera, you press F2 to open a window where you can type a new URI.
For searches, I have configured several search keywords in Opera's integrated search, so I simply press F2 and type, for example,
d recipe, to search for the word "recipe" on DuckDuckGo.com ordoi 10.1126/science.1100199to go to this paper.