1506203 - Combinations of modifiers alt, shift and ctrl do not work as expected when hitting enter in the navigation bar

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P5)

Description

[alexander.kern]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

Modifying hitting enter on the navigation bar with alt, ctrl and shift keys has the following effects:
alt: open in new tab in foreground
ctrl: canonize (www..com)
shift: open new window

Thus, one would predict the combinations to work like I described below in the square parentheses. This is not the current behaviour however, instead it is (in parantheses):

ctrl+shift enter (currently wrong: same as ctrl enter) [should instead canonize and open in new window in foreground]
alt+shift enter (does nothing) [*]
alt+ctrl+shift enter (canonizes and opens in background tab) [same as alt+shift enter but also canonize]

* Combination of alt (foreground tab) and shift (foreground window) doesn't make sense. However, in other contexts shift switches between foreground and background opening (as in ctrl click on link: open in new background tab -- ctrl+shift click: new foreground tab) so I would expect Firefox to open a new tab in background in that case. Also, open in new background tab is a very useful feature and that way some users will find the functionality and be able to use it without setting the about:config flag browser.urlbar.ctrlCanonizesURLs to true (which isn't default on GNU+Linux, not sure about other operating systems, here is a table for that: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VVEVjyIYRZIFteM71j5bJhENa2xXT82gaikr0WgpKLA/edit#gid=0)

Note: alt+ctrl enter works as expected (canonizes in new tab in foreground)







In case of browser.urlbar.ctrlCanonizesURLs set to true:
alt enter opens in tab in foreground
ctrl enter (currently wrong: opens in tab in foreground, same as alt enter) [should open in background tab, as in click on a link while holding ctrl. That was the whole point of issue 237027]
shift enter opens in window in foreground

Combining alt and ctrl, open tab in foreground and open tab in background respectively, does not make sense. My suggestion is to make them open in a new tab in background, just because that feature is useful.

alt+ctrl enter (opens in new foreground tab) [open in new background tab]
alt+shift enter (does nothing) [open in new background tab, my rationale for that is explained at asterisk above]
ctrl+shift enter opens a new background tab [open new window in background makes the most sense]
alt+ctrl+shift enter opens a new background tab [open in new background tab]



This is a followup issue of issue 237027 (I was asked to add a new issue)

Comment 1

[Gyula Palko[:gpalko]]

Setting the same component as the related bug 237027.

Comment 2

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

I'm not sure we want to support all the possible combinations, at a certain point it becomes confusing both for the user and for our code.

Comment 3

[alexander.kern]

Hello Marco, what would you prefer alternatively?

The code and behavior already exists, except for the one special case, alt+shift enter. Even the triple combination alt+ctrl+shift enter exists. So I'm just asking to make the behavior and the code consistent.

And it wouldn't get confusing from the user's perspective at all, since there is just one key combination added and the other ones made consistent so they do what the user would expect. If a user doesn't care about it it wouldn't be confusing, because they'd just never input that key combination and not be aware of the functionality.

Comment 4

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

I'm not saying it's wrong, just that the cost of adding all the possible combinations may overweight the benefit, most users don't know about these. We'd gladly take a community patch, but it's unlikely we may find resources to work on this, unless we're touching the same code for other reasons.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

If people want to contribute a patch, https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6b31860ce710 should give a good idea of what the challenges are and where to look for the relevant code.