I've been running Firefox on Linux for quite some time now, and there's been something that's always bugged me. This doesn't happen on the Windows version, so I thought it was just some sort of platform behavior, but I've finally figured it out.
In Firefox, under both Linux and Windows, if you middle mouse click a link it will cause it to open in a new tab[*]. Where the behavior differs is if you accidentally miss the actual link you were aiming for and click in dead space on the page, under Linux this will inexplicably cause Firefox to take whatever is in your clipboard, paste it into the address bar, and then try to access it whether or not it is an actual URL. If it is not a URL, which will be the case 99 times out of 100, it will then take your random clipboard data, do a google search with it and forward you to the first result google returns. Under Windows, if you miss your link on a middle click, it will cause this odd scrolling thing to pop up that makes your mouse movement control scrolling the page, but I don't know how to fix that. I have, however, figured out how to get rid of the Linux issue.
I'm not claiming I'm a genius, as this would take a person who is fairly competent with Firefox a total of five seconds to figure out, I'm just saying it's been bugging me, I figured it out, so I'm throwing it up here to help anyone who's annoyed by this too:
Going to the address "about:config" in Firefox will bring up a page full of configuration settings. If you put the word "middle" in the filter box, your will see a few matches, one of which being "middlemouse.contentLoadURL". Setting this to "false" will make middle mouse click in dead space do exactly what I whant it to do. Nothing.
That is all.
[*] Since the advent of the scrollwheel, middle mouse buttons are pretty few and far between. On most modern mice, the scroll wheel is clickable and has taken over the middle mouse button's job.
