207601 - UI to disable Find As You Type (type-ahead find)

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Andy Lyttle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

I personally find type-ahead find to be annoying, since accidentally pressing a
key tends to scroll unpredictably and I have to figure out where I was.  It can
be disabled, but not from the Preferences dialog.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Preferences
2. Look for a way to disable type-ahead find

Actual Results:  
There is no such option.

Expected Results:  
Perhaps it should be listed under General?  Or perhaps a new category.

Comment 1

[noririty]

-> RFE

Mozilla Firebird Help has a solution.
http://texturizer.net/firebird/tips.html#beh_taf

Don't let Mozilla Firebird bloated by mess of options.
So I suggest WONTFIX.

Comment 2

[Andy Lyttle]

Whoops, sorry, should have been an RFE.  Fixing subject.

My concern is that the feature may be confusing to a new user, and it's not at all obvious that the 
feature is called Find As You Type  (I didn't realize it had been renamed myself - saw the 
documentation but I guess I skipped over the introduction).  Without knowing that, it's non-trivial 
to find it in the documentation.  I agree that Preferences shouldn't become unnecessarily bloated, 
but I think this is reasonable.

Personally I would prefer that it be turned off by default, and let users turn it on - this gives them 
a chance to see what it's called, so they can read documentation about how to use it if they want.  
This is how Safari's tabbed browsing feature works, for example - it could confuse new users, so 
it's off by default with an obvious option in Preferences.  Getting it turned off by default is 
probably a losing battle though, so I won't fight it. :-)

One definition of a bug is "a feature that can't be turned off".  A feature that can't be turned off 
except by hacking JavaScript code is better, but not as good as it could be. :-)

Comment 3

[Daniel Wang]

don't use RFE keyword. use enh severity

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

taking QA contact, sorry about the bugspam

Comment 5

[Will Levine]

Attachment: patch to add to advanced options

Comment 6

[Will Levine]

Attachment: pref-advanced.js needed for above patch

this js file should be placed next to pref-advanced.xul

Comment 7

[Will Levine]

Attachment: shortenfied version of pref-advanced.js

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Just because six prefs exist doesn't mean they all need to have UI

Links only and on/off are all that end-users are likely to use.  The rest is
stuff more suited for hidden prefs.

Comment 9

[Will Levine]

Attachment: patch with less options

this patch only includes UI options for on/off, text/links only, and sound
on/off.  I thought it would be good idea to keep the sound pref as i have heard
some people complaining about it.

Comment 10

[Will Levine]

Attachment: new pref-advanced.js to go with new patch

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Attachment: patch based on will's previous patches

simpler patch, for eight lines of JS we can hold off on adding another file for
now, drop the sounds pref since its not going to bother 95% of people

Comment 12

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Attachment: revised patch

move options to accessibility, clean up wording

Comment 13

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

--> me

Comment 14

[noririty]

Comment on attachment 130131 [details] [diff] [review]
revised patch

r=noririty

Comment 15

[noririty]

fix landed

Comment 16

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

verified fixed 2003-11-09

Comment 17

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change