1109249 - The new searchbox is not keyboard friendly

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1109851

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Emmanuel Lepage Vallee]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141126041045

Steps to reproduce:

The new searchbox is interesting (despite a default _search_ engine that cannot _find_ anything, but lets not get into politics). 

However, I have hard time using it with the keyboard. I used to change search engine frequently from various bugzilla, Google, component suppliers and wikipedia (more than 50 time per day). 

I could use ctrl+j (on Linux) to focus the searchbox and searching for whatever I wanted using the selected search engine.



Actual results:

With the new searchbox, everytime I press "enter", it always search with the default search engine. I can use tab to select the engine, but this require "n" tab and is rather long when you have 20+ search engine listed.


Expected results:

I would like to suggest that once the search engine engine section is the dialog is selected, new keystroke are used to filter the engine rather than editing the search term.

Workflow example:
ctrl+j (or whatever is the default on other platforms): select search dialog
<enter text>

scenario 1:
<enter>: search using the default engine

scenario 2:
<tab>
<type to filter engines>
<enter>: search using the selected engine

This would improve usability a lot of mitigate the little usability regression explained here while keeping everything else intact.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

It sounds like you want a decent solution to bug 1109851 rather than keyboard navigation necessarily, but we also have bug 1104971 on file for making using the keyboard to select a search engine roughly match the old behaviour.