1349807 - Pressing ESCAPE in location bar should return focus to main pane

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[John Pye]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170317213149

Steps to reproduce:

I thought I would like to type in a URL. I pressed CTRL-L.
Then I changed my mind, I wanted to read a bit more of the page I was reading. I type ESCAPE.



Actual results:

However, pressing ESCAPE does not return me to normal page-reading mode. I can't press up/down/home/end to move around in the document any more.



Expected results:

The fact that ESCAPE does not allow me to escape from the location bar is a problem for keyboard navigation. There appears to be no nice alternative except for ESCAPE then (SHIFT-TAB × 3) to get some focus back to the main pane.

Comment 1

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Pressing F6 switched the focus back to the main pane for me.

Comment 2

[Loic]

Pressing F6 is enough indeed.

Comment 3

[john.peloquin]

If the sidebar is open, F6 must be pressed twice to return focus from the location bar to the document window.  On a normal keyboard, this is ok.  On a compact keyboard, F6 itself may require a key chord, and chording twice in rapid succession is inconvenient.  But Escape is already taken; pressing it twice clears the URL in the location bar.  I suggest that Alt+D and Ctrl+L be made to toggle between location bar focus and document window focus.

Comment 4

[John Pye]

I think that the only thing that makes sense here is for ESCAPE to defocus whatever field is in focus and return the browser to 'normal' operation.

If I am in a file-open dialog, I can press ESCAPE to cancel the dialog and return to normal;
If I type ctrl-F to search in the current page, I can press ESCAPE to return to normal.
If I press ctrl-I to see the page info, I can press ESCAPE to close that dialog and return to normal.

I have already learned that ESCAPE returns to me to normal mode. This is just a sensible cross-application and cross-OS standard behaviour. I would challenge you to find 5% of your users who actually know (or would ever guess) that F6 is the key to use to exit the ctrl-L location bar or ctrl-K search box.

Using ESCAPE once to clear the location bar is fine (if you really want). But pressing it again should get me out of there. LIKE IT SAYS ON THE KEY!!

Comment 5

[John Pye]

@Loic -- I would like to mention that I feel that the "F6 is enough" idea doesn't really work, because F6 is a keystroke that cycles through options. It does not reliably restore the UI to a specific state. It toggles between address bar and main pane (and sidebar too, if it is open). It is a 'stateful' keyboard shortcut.

The idea of ESCAPE as a shortcut is that if you press it enough times, you should get back to some very standard state of your UI, from which you can then reliable start doing your next thing. Firefox lacks such a thing.

Also, on "Escape is already taken; pressing it twice clears the URL in the location bar." -- this does not happen for me. It never clears the URL in the location bar, as far as I can see. I don't know if that is some platform-specific behaviour, perhaps?

Comment 6

[Kevin Ernst]

Hi all, thanks for bringing this up.

Can confirm on macOS and Linux with Firefox ~93-96, Esc, Esc neither clears the address bar / Awesome Bar, nor does it return focus to the main content. I thought this was a recent change of behavior, but I downloaded FF 10.something to confirm, and I guess it's not.

A typical use case where it seems like Esc, Esc should do the right thing, but doesn't:

• Ctrl-or-⌘ + L to focus the address bar
• Ctrl-or-⌘ + C to copy the URL (to paste into an email or whatever)
• Esc, Esc to return focus to the main content
• after which I'd like to be able to just press Space to scroll down, or re-start a video

Instead I have to click-to-focus. Certainly not a big problem on the scale of world problems, just seems weird given how keyboard-navigation-friendly the rest of the Firefox interface is.

F6 to toggle focus between Awesome Bar / main content is just okay, but less intuitive than pressing Esc, and harder to hit on laptop keyboards with bad function keys.

Comment 7

[Kevin Ernst]

(In reply to Kevin Ernst from comment #6)

Can confirm on macOS and Linux with Firefox ~93-96, Esc, Esc neither clears the address bar / Awesome Bar, nor does it return focus to the main content. I thought this was a recent change of behavior, but I downloaded FF 10.something to confirm, and I guess it's not.

…as well as Windows with FF 96.0.2.