933011 - ALT+N and ALT+P hotkeys no longer work with the new Find Bar in Firefox 25

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 932643

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, defect)

Description

[Aleksey Hizhnyak]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

1. Press CTRL+F to open the find bar
2. type some text that exists on the opened webpage in >1 occurrence
3. Try to navigate between typed text matches using ALT+N (Next) or ALT+P (Previous) hotkeys


Actual results:

Nothing happens.
Hotkeys no longer work with the updated find bar in Firefox 25



Expected results:

ALT+P should navigate to the previous occurrence of the typed text, ALT+N - to the next one

Comment 1

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

To be completely honest, I don't believe this is a huge loss for the new find bar, as there are still two other shortcut combinations for these actions: (Shift+) F3 and Enter.

However, I do understand that there is a lack of visual information on this: when before you could see the N and P underlined in the "Next" and "Previous" buttons, now there's no direct way to know, by just looking directly at the UI, how to do this with the keyboard only.

One possible solution: show this information in the tooltip of the buttons, for example when mousing over the next button, the tooltip could read "Find the previous occurrence of the phrase (F3)".

Other possible solution: work the Alt+N/P access keys back into the find bar, although this could be tricky (and possibly weird for localizations) as those buttons don't actually have labels anymore.

Also, should this be blocking maybe bug 776708 or bug 565552?

Comment 2

[Aleksey Hizhnyak]

(In reply to Luís Miguel [:Quicksaver] from comment #1)
> To be completely honest, I don't believe this is a huge loss for the new
> find bar, as there are still two other shortcut combinations for these
> actions: (Shift+) F3 and Enter.
> 
> However, I do understand that there is a lack of visual information on this:
> when before you could see the N and P underlined in the "Next" and
> "Previous" buttons, now there's no direct way to know, by just looking
> directly at the UI, how to do this with the keyboard only.
> 
> One possible solution: show this information in the tooltip of the buttons,
> for example when mousing over the next button, the tooltip could read "Find
> the previous occurrence of the phrase (F3)".
> 
> Other possible solution: work the Alt+N/P access keys back into the find
> bar, although this could be tricky (and possibly weird for localizations) as
> those buttons don't actually have labels anymore.
> 
> Also, should this be blocking maybe bug 776708 or bug 565552?

Shift+F3 and Shift+Enter feel much less natural for hands. To use ALT+N/P I don't have to relocate my hands from "steady typing position", but reaching Enter or F3 isn't very convenient.

Good point about the localized versions - I didn't think of them.
I think a nice alternative would be to have an option in about:config to give the old find bar, just like for the downloads window (browser.download.useToolkitUI).
There are complaints in the internet already for the new behavior of the find bar, so such fix will help with them also.

Comment 3

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

That of course depends on every single user's typing habits (and keyboard). Personally, I'm the complete opposite of you it appears, reaching either F3 or Enter takes far less effort for me than reaching for the alt key. So there will always be a huge "demographic" issue with going with one solution or the other; many users will prefer one way, many others will prefer another...

And not to discourage you, but an option to toggle a different find bar layout just like that is not something we should realistically expect, especially now that Firefox 25 has been released.

Comment 5

[bbird]

(In reply to Luís Miguel [:Quicksaver] from comment #3)
> That of course depends on every single user's typing habits (and keyboard).
> Personally, I'm the complete opposite of you it appears, reaching either F3
> or Enter takes far less effort for me than reaching for the alt key. So
> there will always be a huge "demographic" issue with going with one solution
> or the other; many users will prefer one way, many others will prefer
> another...

You and many others certainly have a difference preference.  But, the opposite is also true.  It is our preferred method that was removed.  This was a change to default behavior that existed.  Why not continue to allow for both methods?  I don't mean a config bit to revert to the old layout. Just put the ALT+ short-cut keys back.

> 
> And not to discourage you, but an option to toggle a different find bar
> layout just like that is not something we should realistically expect,
> especially now that Firefox 25 has been released.