1273517 - Middle mouse click and hover at [?] help button in settings does nothing

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Jens]

Attachment: Help_Button.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 /
Build ID: 20160516004009

Steps to reproduce:

Followup of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268943

Middle mouse click on the [?] button/link on the right hand side to learn more about the preferences on the settings page. 


Actual results:

Nothing


Expected results:

1. On hover: Have the mouse cursor as pointer (the "hand") instead of default to indicate to the user that clicking on the [?] opens a link on a new page. Just having the default mouse cursor looks like a popup or something else might happen.

2. On mouse middle click: Open link in new tab. Same behaviour as left mouse click instead of just nothing.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jens from bug 1268943 comment #22)
> >> 2. The help links are not middle mouse clickable
> 
> > See above. This is platform consistent with help buttons on OS X and Windows.
> 
> I tested this on Windows 8.1 but failed to see a [?] help button anywhere
> within its settings pages.

In internet explorer, open the "internet options" and you'll see one in the title bar.

https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=dialog+help+button+windows&oq=dialog+help+button+windows

These used to be pretty common. Less so in more recent versions of Windows. They're still very common on OS X:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=os+x+settings+help+button&source=lnms&tbm=isch has several good examples

> I'd also say that in-content browser settings are
> different than OS settings.

I'm not talking about OS settings though, I'm talking about settings in applications on those OSes. I noticed you filed bug 1268943 from Linux, where conventions are effectively limited to particular window managers / UI toolkits and so it's a bit messy trying to discern what "makes sense". So I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the other OSes - but it applies to applications on those OSes, not (just) OS settings themselves.

And yes, the button is technically an actual <button>. We could style it to look like a link, and make middle-clicking it work, it just doesn't seem like it should be a high priority change.