1290424 - Mouse-over (hover) on a dropdown suggestion (search, URL) causes the hovered-over item to be deleted on 'delete'-press

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P2)

Description

[Joris Debonnet]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20160728030208

Steps to reproduce:

The behavior is slightly different for the URL bar and the Search bar, so I wrote them separately. Also see the note at the end concerning similar behavior in Thunderbird.

1. Click on the URL bar
2. Type 'Goog'
3. While typing, two types of suggestions will appear:
3.a. The bar will suggest goog[le.com] (the section in [  ] appears selected)
3.b. A dropdown also appears with other suggestions
4. After having clicked on the bar, the mouse may have 'accidently slid down' a little, to one of the dropdown suggestions. I don't care, because I don't want the suggestions. I press return. 

1. Click on the search bar
2. Type 'Goog'
3. While typing, suggestions will appear in the dropdown. I don't care about them, because I want to type something new. My mouse may slide down to one of the suggestions though, after I've clicked in the bar.
4. I decide I want to search for something else, so I select what I wrote (shift-control-arrow left) and press delete, so that I can type something else. 


Actual results:

The mouse-hovered item is affected, rather than the typed one.

- In the case of the url bar, [return] navigates to the hover-over item instead of what's in the url bar. 
- In the case of the search bar, [delete] deletes the hovered-over search suggestion instead of the word I typed and selected.


Expected results:

When I press a keyboard key such as return or delete, I expect it to have an effect on the area I'm typing in, not on what I'm mouse-hovering on. The current behavior is mixing two different input options, which is very confusing. 

If I want to mouse-select, I'll mouse-hover and mouse-click. If I want to keyboard-select, I'll keyboard-arrow-down and keyboard-return. If I want to delete, I'll keyboard-arrow-down and keyboard-(shift-)delete. 

Whatever the case, I don't expect what I'm hovering over to be "selected". I'm only "hovering"..... 

This may be related to Bug 1176107 and/or Bug 1283398.


[NOTE]
I experience the same issue in Thunderbird, it actually has even worse implications there. I may type "Ma" in the To: field and see that "Maarten" is pre-filled, which is great because he's who I want. My mouse may have slid down to another option starting with "Ma" though, but it wouldn't cross my mind that when I now click in the body of my email, or press "Send", that it will secretly change the To-field and send my email to who I was hovering over rather than to who actually appeared as typed-in! 

This behavior did not occur a year ago (maybe a little more), so a relatively recent change caused hovered-over items to be considered to be 'selected'.

Comment 1

[Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]]

I confirmed the same behavior on Firefox 5.
So this doesn't seems to be a recent regression.

Comment 2

[dmitry.redkin]

Yes it's an old story, but it is VERY annoying and inconvenient. The cursor in the search bar blinks as always, 'backspace' deletes previous letter as it should, but 'delete' somehow makes something very different.
I know about this for a long time but every time I run into this I swear aloud.
If changing such behavior of 'delete' is unacceptable, then maybe it would be better to hide cursor from search bar when mouse hovers over search suggestions?

Comment 3

[Joris Debonnet]

It can be even more confusing: 
- use a chrome-tweak to hide the (relatively) new "Visit [url]" option in the dropdown suggestions (a lot of people don't like it)
- type a few letters in the urlbar
- hover over some dropdown options
- click on the urlbar again, to effectively close the dropdown
- press return

Despite the fact that you can't even see what was hovered over anymore, Firefox will navigate to the top dropdown suggestion that was hovered over rather than what is typed in the urlbar. So you can't even undo the hover-selection by closing the dropdown! 

Usually, this is fine because the top option (which you normally pass over as you go to click the urlbar) is the same as what appears in the urlbar, with "Visit" or "Search" next to it. So it is normally the last option you hovered over before you hide the dropdown. But a lot of users strongly dislike that new feature (see Bug 1295194 and related), so I am using a tweak to hide that redundant option from the dropdown. But apparently a side effect of that is that it is now absolutely impossible to navigate to what I actually typed in, if I also accidently mouse-hovered over any dropdown suggestion. I have to retype part of it in order to reset that undesired "hover-selection".

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I think bug 1295458 has basically fixed this, now mouse over doesn't select, it's just an hover.

Comment 5

[Cristian Comorasu, QA [:ccomorasu], Releae Desktop QA - Please contact [e-mail]]

I reproduced this issue using Fx 50.0a1, build ID: 20160729030203,on Windows 10 x64, following the steps from the description.
Using Fx 55.0b2, the behavior has improved, as it deletes only one suggestion. Is this expected? 

Can you please confirm this? Thank you!

Screen cast: http://imgur.com/a/glWpg

Comment 6

[Joris Debonnet]

Indeed, I can confirm that 55.0b2 fixes this issue! 

I think your example is as expected, as it deletes just the untyped goog[le.com/] in the address bar, which updates the suggestions that appear.

Comment 7

[Cristian Comorasu, QA [:ccomorasu], Releae Desktop QA - Please contact [e-mail]]

Based on comment 6 I am updating the flags.

Cheers!

Comment 8

[dmitry.redkin]

Gents, could you please check if this bug is also fixed for a search bar, not only for address bar?

Comment 9

[Joris Debonnet]

Well, the original description of this bug is fixed. If you mouseover a search suggestion and press delete, it won't delete that item (because it's not selected (blue), only hovered (grey). 

But if you press arrow-down to select one of the history items or suggestions, then change your mind and want to change part of the search query by selecting it with shift-arrow-left and pressing delete, that will still delete the item in the list, not the word you selected. I admit this is still annoying, but I'm not sure it completely matches this bug description? 

Example situation, where pressing delete will not do what is expected: http://imgur.com/a/mFBRj

Comment 10

[dmitry.redkin]

Well, if you'll ask me, I'd say that pressing any left-right arrow while item in list is selected (not highlighted, or "hovered") should remove selection from list so any following "delete" press would go to edit box, not list.