1410509 - Allow Ctrl and Alt together in keyboard shortcuts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1426958

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Marat Tanalin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171019140425

Steps to reproduce:

In my UsableHomeButton extension [1], there are three keyboard shortcuts:

A. `Alt+Home` is a keyboard equivalent of pressing the browser’s Home button;
B. `Ctrl +(Alt+Home)` is equivalent of pressing the button while holding down the `Ctrl` key;
C. `Shift+(Alt+Home)` is equivalent of pressing the button while holding down the `Shift` key.

So the shortcuts B and C extend the basic `Alt+Home` shortcut.


Actual results:

In the WebExtensions API, `Alt` and `Ctrl` keys can’t be used together anymore for an unknown reason [2]:

> secondary modifier (optional). If supplied, this must be "Shift"

So the `Ctrl+(Alt+Home)` shortcut is impossible.


Expected results:

The limitation should probably be removed since there is nothing wrong in keyboard shortcuts like `Ctrl+(Alt+Home)`, they work perfectly and, in this case, provide intuitive and consistent keyboard navigation. Thanks.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/usablehomebutton/
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/commands

Comment 1

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Marat, this has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on March 13, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

* 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/1b4r8z964_Est_mbSYUx9jtRt-HTtXgu-EAzM_3yr7ww/edit
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

This sounded good to us in the design-decision meeting, but wanted to run this by Mark for feedback before approving.

Comment 3

[Mark Striemer [:mstriemer]]

Duping this to bug 1426958 since it is already approved and is more generic.