1115907 - Selected Text link issues

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[mdew]

Attachment: test.html

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20141223193008

Steps to reproduce:

Open text.html example
Select/Highlight text and right click on link. 



Actual results:

Send me to the <a href=link> and not the hightlighted text.


Expected results:

Selected text should ignore <a ref= if it involves a domain name or a sub menu to open the selected text.

Comment 1

[[:Aleksej]]

If I click the link, the href (google) is used; if I click elsewhere, the text (yahoo) is used.

Comment 2

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

(In reply to mdew from comment #0)
> Select/Highlight text and right click on link. 
I think it's ok when selecting right click/open link to open the href (google).

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is an interesting issue. Jared, Philipp, what do you think we should do here? I think the current behaviour is actually fine - if the selected text is a web link, and it's inside a real link, the user expects the visible text to be what is opened, not the (invisible) link's "real" target. So I think this should be WONTFIX. But maybe you disagree?

Comment 4

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

To me, selecting text is a pretty deliberate action, so I would expect that the highlighted text is what gets visited, not the embedded href attribute.

Comment 5

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

I agree that this should be a wontfix, mostly to ensure consistent behavior. It would also create a whole new set of problems (what happens when more than one URL is in the selected text block?).
If the link text is already selected, it is only marginally more work to copy it to the address bar.