1270587 - Multiple dropdown menus on simultaneous Alt+<key> key presses

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 498725

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[psn]

Attachment: doublemenu.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Build ID: 20160505030327

Steps to reproduce:

While holding Alt key press together G and H; that easily could be done with one finger.
Slightly trickier though still simple are H and V keys or H and E - and probably any other hotkey combination from the main menu.


Actual results:

Two dropdown menus will be displayed as in the attached picture.

Moreover, while writing this after several attempts I made three dropdown menus in Firefox with  F, E and V keys.


Expected results:

There should be no more than one menu.

Comment 1

[Anindya-Pandey]

Was able to reproduce the bug. 
Initially pressed alt+G. The Go menu appeared. Then while holding G, pressed H. No other menu appeared.
Then pressed alt and while holding alt, pressed G and H exactly at the same time. Both the Go menu and the Help menu appeared.
I don't know how this can be solved though. There's already a mechanism in place which prevents any other menu from appearing before all previous drop down menus have been closed. 
I think giving different menus different priorities could be a possible solution so that if two key presses are detected exactly at the same time Thunderbird is able to decide which of the corresponding menus to display.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(how odd that two people should comment on this issue just a few days apart.)

I've often seen this. Mostly from doing Alt+F+E in Firefox.  Not so recently.  Perhaps my newer system is too fast.  

I was not able to find other reports of this in Firefox or Thunderbird - bug query http://mzl.la/24s6kPg

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

How odd that I've digged out and analysed this problem just a few weeks ago... This certainly looks like a problem in the underlying XUL, as we must never have a situation of double focus. This isn't minor because triggering random commands from menus that should never be open in the first place has a significant potential for errors and dataloss depending on the circumstances.

Comment 4

[psn]

> This isn't minor because triggering random commands from menus that should never be open in the first place has a significant potential for errors and dataloss depending on the circumstances.

You could also take into account this report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1296240
as another annoying input focus issue.

Comment 5

[psn]

Slightly different case spotted today, though very much in line with the subject.
I pressed 'Alt+H', then 'a' to get "About ..." dialog.
Instead, I had dropdown for 'Alt+H', but 'a' went to URL input window and list of suggested addresses unfolded under dropdown menu.