1246492 - "ENTER" keyboard shortcut not documented

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Joe Petree]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20160105164030

Steps to reproduce:

Hit ENTER key


Actual results:

page scrolls forward 1 page


Expected results:

I don't know.  Use of ENTER as a keyboard shortcut is not documented.  

Additionally, ENTER + SHIFT scrolls backward one page.  Again, not documented.

Comment 1

[William Chen [:wchen]]

ENTER does different things depending on context, what is focused and even on the platform. Documenting all the behavior of the ENTER key would not be practical. We have alternate and documented shortcuts for scrolling.

Comment 2

[Joe Petree]

this is a cop out.  

If nothing else, you should document that ENTER is a keyboard shortcut.  (I spent an hour tryng to figure out if something was broken or if I had an extension doing this or if I had set up an Autohokey hotkey.)  

Better yet, you should document the most common occurrence of enter (which I suspect is scrolling down 1 page) and then note that other things occur in other situations.  

And, best, of course, would be to document all the various things ENTER might do in the various situations.

Doing nothing is just laziness and shows a lack of pride in the product.  Let it be known that I do not consider dismissing this omission as having resolved the issue.

Comment 3

[William Chen [:wchen]]

The ENTER key is not a standard keyboard shortcut for scrolling. It does not scroll on Windows 10, OS X 10.11 and various recent distributions of Linux. Thus it does not make sense to document it as a shortcut, especially when we already have documented keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing you mention.

The behavior you are seeing may be due to your platform, add-on or another application. Trying to document behavior for every configuration makes maintenance more difficult and can cause confusion because the rules for when a certain shortcut works becomes more complex.

Comment 4

[Joe Petree]

That is interesting to learn.  Thank you.  I will certainly agree what you have now said.  I would, then, ask for only one thing.      

This is the page I am referring to:  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Keyboard+shortcuts

This page says, quite explicitly and at the VERY top:  "This is a list of keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox."  I would like to suggest that this VERY STRONG and VERY SPECIFIC wording be changed so as to include the sentiments you have expressed.  

(Yes, it does NOT say it is a definitive list, just a list....but, one the other hand, it does not say a list of just some.... so, why not be precise?)  Thus, I am simply asking that that one sentence be improved.  Adding the other stuff about different platforms etc. would also be much appreciated.