1366625 - Right click in the Address Bar popup should not select

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]]

1. Write something in the search bar.
2. Right click some suggested item, this will select it.
3. Press enter.

or

1. Write something in the search bar.
2. Left mousedown some suggested item, this will select it.
3. Before releasing the button, press enter.

Selecting the item didn't update the text in the search bar, so you won't navigate to the selected item.

Note the text is updated when you use the up and arrow keys to change the selected item.

This behavior is old, but after bug 1295458 and bug 1356641 it makes sense to update the text whenever the selected item changes. This is also what Chrome does.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Some edge cases with new mousehover behavior.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

There are 2 conflating issues here:
1. right click, this should probably be ignored, at least until we don't have a contextual menu. We currently seem to handle it as a left click. Right click should not select.
2. we select on click, not mousedown. Whether this is wanted or not may also depend on how complex is to change the current behavior. Chrome seems to select on mousedown so it may be nice to be coherent for users migrating to Firefox.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Note these issues are likely to affect both the location bar and the search bar.

Comment 4

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

It's not a recent regression, but it is more jarring with one-off buttons.

Comment 5

[Emma Humphries ☕️🎸🧞‍♀️✨ (she/they) [:emceeaich] (Pacific Time) use needinfo]

This is a P1 bug without an assignee. 

P1 are bugs which are being worked on for the current release cycle/iteration/sprint. 

If the bug is not assigned by Monday, 28 August, the bug's priority will be reset to '--'.

Comment 7

[Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]]

Sorry but I disagree, selecting with right-click has its use-cases.

If browser.urlbar.suggest.openpage is enabled (it is by default), then if the page you want to navigate to is already open in another tab, clicking the entry will switch to this existing tab.

This is sometimes undesirable. You can use Ctrl+click to force the page to open in a new tab, but it will open at the end of the tabbar and not next to the current one.

So instead I select (not click) the desired entry, and then press Ctrl+enter

But if the desired entry is near the bottom, selecting it with the arrow keys is annoying. Selecting it with right-click is much more convenient.

Additionally, as I said in comment 0, the urlbar is also not updated when changing selected entry by keeping left button down. Disabling right click won't fix this.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Oriol Brufau [:Oriol] from comment #7)
> If browser.urlbar.suggest.openpage is enabled (it is by default), then if
> the page you want to navigate to is already open in another tab, clicking
> the entry will switch to this existing tab.

Just alt+click. Also shift+click should WORK, but looks like it's bogus and opens in a new window. ALT and SHIFT are the keys to override actions (like switch to tab).
Using an unintended workaround is not a good idea in general, if there's a UX problem it should be handled properly by UX.

> But if the desired entry is near the bottom, selecting it with the arrow
> keys is annoying. Selecting it with right-click is much more convenient.

Probably, but it's still an unintended workaround. If it's hard to reach the bottom result, there may be better solutions.
 
> Additionally, as I said in comment 0, the urlbar is also not updated when
> changing selected entry by keeping left button down.

I don't see a use case for this and as far as I can tell it's by design.

It's possible in the future we'll add a contextual menu for items, and then it's likely we'll select the item before opening the menu, but until then it doesn't make much sense.

in the end, comment 2 is still the plan.

Comment 9

[lilydjwg]

It's sad that this is not a feature. My use case is to quickly jump to the url I'm going to edit or copy.

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Not a priority for now, we should re-evaluate this once we decide to add a contextual menu to the Address Bar matches.