1200954 - Hotkeys on the Preferences page require Alt-Shift rather than Alt (which is used in the rest of the app)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1194528

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Martin Stružský]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
Build ID: 20150827142634

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to Options page.
2. Pres Alt + any of the underlined letters.


Actual results:

Nothing happens or a menu drops down (depends on the letter selected).


Expected results:

Checkboxes should trigger, buttons should be pressed etc.

Comment 1

[Michal Stanke (Mozilla.cz) [:mstanke][:MikkCZ]]

The right shortcut is Shift+Alt+key [1], which works fine. Eventually you can adjust it by about:config preference [2], but Alt+key won't work well, as Alt has its own functionality already.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-firefox-make-firefox-and-we#w_html-access-keys
[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Ui.key.contentAccess

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Hang on a moment... for things still implemented in XUL and non in-content, like the History window, the key is Alt. So it seems like we are telling our users to use a different key here depending on our underlying implementation choices. That doesn't seem right to me.

I'd also note that the key allocation is a mess at the moment. On the General preferences, for example, there are several instances of clashing keys (W, C) and several items which don't have a key at all...

Gerv

Comment 3

[Josh Gaunt [:jgaunt]]

If we're going to require one part of the UI to violate the expectations that have been built up using another part we need to at the least make it trivial to resolve the violation.

I just started typing up a new bug on this before I was drawn here because it wasn't obvious that SHIFT + had to be added to the hotkey macro. I've personally never encountered any other UI that's required that for hotkey activation and assumed it was broken.

Most end users won't come to bugzilla to figure it out.

Comment 4

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

I'm glad I found this bug while searching on why I can't use the underlined letter together with Alt. I tried Alt-shift and it works indeed.

It is strange to press Alt-E, then 'n' to go to preferences, then click on the side for "privacy & security" as there is no shortcut for that, and then use Alt-Shift-l twice to get to the "saved logins" button that I initially wanted.

Can the user experience for this be improved?

Comment 5

[jmgonk]

This sounds like a duplicate of 1194528 .

Comment 6

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I concur, this reads like a dupe of bug 1194528.