1244498 - Press on text selects nearby link instead of selecting the word at the press position

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1233272

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Text Selection, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 5.0; Mobile; rv:47.0) Gecko/47.0 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160130030240

Steps to reproduce:

Press over a word.


Actual results:

A nearby link was selected.


Expected results:

The word should have been selected.

Tested with Nightly.
Same bug as bug 826601.

Comment 1

[Vincent Lefevre]

Here's the URL: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696282

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

My device is now the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. And I did the press with the finger.

Comment 3

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

Thanks Vincent ! I don't see anything quick-testing on my test GS3 ... so I can try to repro this / track down the issue, can you tell me specifically:

a) what word in that page you've pressed ?
and
b) which link is then incorrectly selected ?

Please feel free to go into detail, every bit helps. I'm a little surprised our new |Magnifying glass| option isn't helping you avoid this issue.

This is new since your first bug was filed, so we'll need to look into that as a possibility.

Thanks for your help in advance :-)

Comment 4

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to Mark Capella [:capella] from comment #3)
> a) what word in that page you've pressed ?

* "grave"
* "Villemot"

> and
> b) which link is then incorrectly selected ?

In both cases, the link a bit above the pressed word.

The problem disappears when I zoom a lot (too much!).

> Please feel free to go into detail, every bit helps. I'm a little surprised
> our new |Magnifying glass| option isn't helping you avoid this issue.

I don't know what is this |Magnifying glass| option.

Comment 5

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

Yah, I can get nearby links to fire now too, if I don't zoom ( I have fat fingers :-( ), and I reflexively zoom in those cases so wouldn't noticed something like touch-radius issues...

I bet using a pen like you mentioned in the old bug helps ?

The magnifying glass is a new feature mozilla is testing in nightly, similar to what chrome provides ...

Seen in the video using Chrome [0], if you tap in the upper right of a small screen with a lot of detail, a magnifying bubble pops up showing you a closer view of that small area, and you can then more easily tap what you actually intended to tap.

(It's like any auto-zoom helper.)

I'd have shown you ours, but for some reason I couldn't make it pop-up just now. It's experimental, so maybe broken, or I don't know how to invoke it properly yet.

This may not be relevent to you in any case, as the magnifying stuff is helping for tap confusion, and you're long-pressing.


[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2amay6gkfgcv1hi/bug_1244498.mp4?dl=0

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

My two cents: I think the code is working as intended here. In the majority of cases when a user taps or long-taps on text near a link, they really intend to hit the link, and that's what the code assumes and optimizes for. In this instance, that's not the case, but for the common case the code does the right thing. Here the user can either zoom in and then long-press on the text, or they can adjust their ui.touch.radius.* prefs to their liking.

The magnifying glass doesn't pop up here because the tap isn't ambiguous between multiple links - it's a link vs regular text, and in that case the link always "wins".

Comment 7

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

I agree with kats here, there isn't much more we can do beyond what's already reasonably available (quick-zoom), to improve things.

I didn't see an answer to whether using a pen on helps with the small text on your devices screen, but I suspect the answer is yes.

Comment 8

[Vincent Lefevre]

I disagree. There should be a way to disable the link preference: if I wanted to follow a link, I would tap on the link itself, not above or below. The ui.touch.radius.* prefs seem to have no effect at all: I've set the 4 values (in the 4 directions) to 0, and I've tried ui.touch.radius.enabled set to true and false, and nothing changes.

Comment 9

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to Mark Capella [:capella] from comment #7)
> I didn't see an answer to whether using a pen on helps with the small text
> on your devices screen, but I suspect the answer is yes.

I've just tried with the stylus, and the behavior is the same as with the finger.

Comment 10

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Sorry, my mistake. It's the ui.mouse.radius.enabled pref that needs to be set to false. The touch one is already false by default and it's the mouse events that you want to prevent from being retargeted. Can you try that please?

Comment 11

[Vincent Lefevre]

Thanks, setting the ui.mouse.radius.enabled pref to false makes the behavior work exactly as I expect, even with Firefox beta (45.0b1). But I fear that users who want it would not know this option[*]. And perhaps it could be added to the Accessibility settings menu.

[*] After searching for "firefox for android copy" on Google, I found:

  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-copy-and-paste-text-android

but this page doesn't mention this option and doesn't even mention the nearby link feature. This is really confusing.

I let this bug open due to the documentation issue and in case the Accessibility settings menu needs to be improved, otherwise it can be resolved as WFM.

Comment 12

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

Sweet success :)

Comment 13

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

It's probably worth creating a kb article in support.m.o for this, although I don't know if it's a common enough scenario to warrant changing the accessibility menu.

Comment 14

[Nicolae Albu]

Setting ui.mouse.radius.enabled to false also fixes bug 1182804, which is slightly different (clickable element next to link). I really find no use for this "helper" feature, with it disabled, I'm very accurate in desktop websites on a 4.0 inch screen, no more accidental nearby / wrong link clicks.

It should definitely be mentioned at least in an article as it's very unintuitive (mouse in name, affects touch...).