1512646 - Keyboard accelerator in link contextual menu (right click) isn't consistent with Firefox's

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[axel simon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0

Steps to reproduce:

In an email, right click on a link (ie: https://whatever.com/example) to copy it and open it elsewhere. Expect to find the same keyboard shortcut / accelerator as in Firefox: 'a'.
By keyboard accelerator I mean "the letter you press after you have right clicked and opened a contextual menu to directly select a given option of the contextual menu".


Actual results:

The keyboard accelerator to "Copy Link Location" is 'c' in Thunderbird.
The keyboard accelerator to "Copy Link Location" is 'a' in Firefox.


Expected results:

Context menu keyboard accelerators should be as consistent as possible between Firefox and Thunderbird.

The problem in this specific case is that 'a' is used in Thunderbird as an accelerator for "Select All" (as in select all text of the email).

Proposed suggestion: remove the "Select All" option for link contextual menus and only show it when clicking on normal text, not links (which is what Firefox does) and then assign 'a' as a keyboard accelerator to "Copy Link Location", for consistency with Firefox.

Problem with this solution: the 'a' action changes whether you are clicking on text or a link, creating two things to remember instead of one. But this issue exists in Firefox too, where 'a' accelerates to different thing depending on which contextual menu one calls up (normal text or link).

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thank you for the idea. But I don't believe we would do this, for two reasons mainly a) A is a shortcut for select all in other parts of the UI, and likewise L is used for link operations - in compose for example, b) our general policy is to avoid changing key combinations (because of user muscle memory) unless there is a overwhelming reason to make the change, which sometimes comes when there is some other major change, such as adding a new function.

We currently have consistency with those letters within Thunderbird, which is what matters most. And we sometimes struggle to determine key combos - adding a condition of consistency with Firefox makes that decision making process more difficult.