As part of setting up the new laptop over the weekend, I’ve installed (among other things) AVG for anti-virus and Firefox as my main web-browser.

Bizarrely, I found that when I was entering a URL in Firefox, the Enter key wasn’t working – I had to click on the ‘Go’ arrow in order to get it to go to the URL. Now, I never click to go to a URL, always just type it in and whack Enter, so this was going to be something that was deeply annoying if it stayed around.

It turns out that AVG installs a toolbar/add-on in Firefox called “AVG Safesearch” and for some reason it’s that add-on that was breaking the functionality for the Enter key. I don’t know why this is the case – it strikes me as just something that hasn’t been tested properly.

But if you’re having a problem with the Enter key not working in Firefox, the first port of call is to check you’re not running AVG Safesearch. As soon as it’s disabled, everything works fine.

Most odd.