1392999 - Support adding actions to the (floating) text selection action bar on Android (via menu with context type "selection")

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: Extensions, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Classic add-ons on Android are able to add an action to the (floating) action bar that appears when selecting text.

Use case:
E.g. providing a translation for the selected text (https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/tap-translate/)

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Also note that this is the only context menu-like thing available in Fennec for selected text, so maybe this could be implemented as part of the context menu API?

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Jan, this has been added to the agenda for the January 16, 2018 WebExtensions APIs triage meeting. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13AiUqFgtLsuJ17QjzUOQ7nBN1U_ZEO0yzMaHLLl0JKk/edit#
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 3

[Andy McKay]

Yeah this makes total sense. We talked about this in the past using the context menu as you mentioned, so there's probably another bug to dupe it to somewhere. As I remember you can get different context menus depending upon the *cough* context. I think right clicking (I know this isn't a right click) without a selection or right clicking on an image also bring up menus.

Comment 4

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

bug 1595822 is about implementing a part of the menus API in GeckoView, starting with menus for web content.

With the menus API present, we can reuse the existing "selection" context type of the menus/contextMenus API, to allow extensions to add to the text selection menu.

Moving over to GeckoView since this implementation mostly involves changes in the Java code, plus some extension glue.

Add me as a reviewer when there is a patch.