1289285 - Back/forward shortcut keys should be flipped on RTL languages

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect, P3)

Description

[Matt Giuca]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.21 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox in Hebrew or Arabic language (LANG=he or LANG=ar).
2. Navigate to a page (so the Back button becomes available).
3. Press Alt+Left and Alt+Right a few times.


Actual results:

Alt+Left goes back. Alt+Right goes forward.

This is confusing as it is the reverse of the actual Back and Forward buttons in the UI (left arrow goes forward, right arrow goes back).


Expected results:

Alt+Left goes forward. Alt+Right goes back.

This would match the Back and Forward buttons in the UI.

Notes:
Cross-posting from Chromium bug https://crbug.com/612685. This same bug exists in Chrome, IE and Edge. It's therefore an open question whether it should be fixed, or maintained for compatibility. If we got cross-browser support to flip it, that might be better than just Chrome (for instance) changing on its own.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Ehsan, do you have thoughts on this?

Also flagging Axel, maybe he can forward this request to someone else.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

CCing a bunch of community members.

Comment 3

[(no longer active)]

We've had the existing behavior for many years now, so all other things being equal I'd rather not change it, since it can break people's muscle memory but I agree with Matt that this is definitely confusing, at least when people learn the shortcut for the first time...  Reading the chromium bug, they also seem to not be in a rush to change anything here, because of compatibility with other browsers, so if we decide to change our behavior here we should coordinate with those folks as well.

Comment 4

[Peter Kasting]

One reason we're willing to change if others are is that we believe that until now, most people didn't use this shortcut, since backspace/shift-backspace were easier to hit and more widely known.  Now that Chrome has removed those shortcuts, we're explicitly directing people toward these.

Comment 5

[Ahmed Nefzaoui [:Nefzaoui]]

I think we should definitely keep consistency with the UI, thus if the actual UI arrows are flipped in RTL (which should be the case) their counterpart shortcuts should too, otherwise it's confusing when you click the UI arrow (->) to go back in time, but you click the Alt + (<-) to go back in time as well.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Peter Kasting from comment #4)
> One reason we're willing to change if others are is that we believe that
> until now, most people didn't use this shortcut, since
> backspace/shift-backspace were easier to hit and more widely known.  Now
> that Chrome has removed those shortcuts, we're explicitly directing people
> toward these.

Consensus seems to be that this change makes sense. I don't think we should be too worried about breaking muscle memory. Doing this might be slightly painful for a short time but that seems preferable over keeping nonsensical behavior forever.

Please let us know when you've decided to do this and we'll follow suit.

Comment 7

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Moving to p3 because no activity for at least 1 year(s).
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage for more information