What happens once in a while, when one tries to type in the address bar?

….And what do you do to stop it from doing that?

You must have bumped “Alt.” Press alt again to go back to normal.

Oh, nice, @Mariah! I love shortcuts, but that was one I hadn’t known about. That’s it.

What does the cross-like cursor do?

Thank you. @Mariah.

@dxs if you’re talking about what looks like a + sign with arrows at the end of each segment, that’s used to either resize the current window or to move it (assuming it’s not already full-screen, I think). In most cases you can “Esc” out of that if you’ve gotten it inadvertently.

It doesn’t seem to do anything different when I press alt.

@dxs Thank you so much! I just had that + sign with arrows on it. Didn’t know how to fix it. It was in full screen mode. Somehow I got that by accident.

But as an aside, what could have been on the list in the menu? How do you get back the problem anyway?

I don’t know what this talk of Alt and a cross cursor is… none of that appears for me at all.

If your computer is like mine, @flo, you may have seen a drop-down of the addresses and search terms that you’ve typed into your address bar in the past. Your browser holds that history until you clear it.

The alt business is only for Windows machines, btw.

@Mariah I have a PC.

I have a Mac and I get a cross on the url line when I press alt.
I’m still wondering what the cross’s purpose is. That is, what it does differently than the typical “fancy I” cursor.

@dappled_leaves . it’s similar to what you get when click or hover on let’s say Edit. So, no it’s definitely not my previous search terms.

By the way, I posted the OP just in case it happens to me in the future. The issue happened last week. I don’t know what made the problem disappear. So, like @dxs, I too pressed Alt and nothing happened.