1515464 - Regression: Back and Forward keyboard shortcuts broken on Mac with German (and likely other) Keyboard Layouts

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P3)

Description

[Chris]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

(Opening a separate ticket as requested here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306585#c61)

I am using OSX with a German Keyboard Layout. I presses CMD-Ä and CMD-Ö in the middle of a browsing session.

(I also tried CMD+OPTION+5, CMD+OPTION+6, CMD+OPTION+8, CMD+OPTION+9 as they are how you would type CMD+[ and CMD+] on a German Keyboard on Mac and because they are the standard Mac shortcuts for Forward/Backwards and the normal Firefox Shortcuts for Forward/Backwards. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306585 seems to indicate that this was changed to CMD+Ä/CMD+Ö though.)

(Workaround for other readers via BetterTouchTools suggested here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306585#c59 . Using the 3F Swipe Left/Right as Keyboard trigger worked for me)


Actual results:

Nothing


Expected results:

Browser went page back / forward

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I have a mac mini but with an english keyboard. I will try to find the regression range when a standard windows usb keyboard with german layout works.

Comment 2

[Chris]

according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306585#c61
this worked fine in version 12(!) and broke in version 13 of Firefox, 7 years ago. And it looks like it may not only happen with German keyboards judging from the comments.

Comment 3

[Chris]

Thank you Matthias for looking at this :). Just enabling the German "Input Source" in MacOS should allow to reproduce.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I can confirm that ctrl+ä and ctrl+ö are not working in Firefox 64 and even in older releases while it works in Safari.

Comment 5

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Basically, I introduced cmd+ö/ä for sv-SE in bug 306585 since the cmd+[/] combo didn't worked. Looking at https://dxr.mozilla.org/l10n-central/rev/0b95b67daa70d8722460bafb26105055ba21299d/de/browser/chrome/browser/browser.dtd#790 the keys are there (and they where added back in 2010 for DE in https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/de/rev/9ea8273e68ca).

So, this is a "newer" problem (cmd+ö/ä doesn't work).

Comment 6

[Chris]

An alternative solution to this problem would be reintroducing "Back" and "Forward" entries under the "History" main menu item. Both Chrome and Safari (as well as Finder) have those. Having it as a main menu items allows assigning keyboard short cuts via OSX directly,

Comment 7

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

It would be interesting to know if Ctrl+Ö and Ctrl+Ä works on Linux.

Comment 8

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

(note: you can use Cmd + left/right arrow as an alternative)

Comment 9

[Chris]

Cmd + left/right does not work as an alternative when inside of an input element that allows to type text, e.g. a web form, the menu bar, the find-in-page search etc. That's actually why I am here. I would like a shortcut that doesn't suffer from this to work. Using cmd+left/right requires mental awareness of the context and it happens to me frequently that I go back by accident because an input element lost focus or that I try to go back, but focus had shifted to an input element.

Comment 10

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

This used to work and the key bindings are there. I did some tests with the sv-SE versions and this works in Firefox 36.0.4, but it doesn't work in Firefox 37.0.

Comment 11

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

(In reply to Stefan [:stefanh] from comment #10)
> This used to work and the key bindings are there. I did some tests with the
> sv-SE versions and this works in Firefox 36.0.4, but it doesn't work in
> Firefox 37.0.

Forget that, the sv-SE localization changed during that time and the keys switched from "Ö" and "Ä" to "[" and "]".

Comment 12

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Chris, I have now tested with the German versions of Firefox (with German keyboard layout) and it works fine for me with 64.0 which you reported this on. It also works fine for me with the beta version (65.0b3).

This is with MacOS 10.12.6.

(In reply to Matthias Versen [:Matti] from comment #4)
> I can confirm that ctrl+ä and ctrl+ö are not working in Firefox 64 and even
> in older releases while it works in Safari.

This is probably a typo, but just to be sure: I believe you mean "Cmd" and not "Ctrl", right? Since it works for me on 10.12.6: What version of MacOS did you tested with ?

Comment 13

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Sorry I meant CMD/windows Key (both are identical).
>Since it works for me on 10.12.6: What version of MacOS did you tested with ?
With OSX10.11.6 and Firefox64 de-de

Comment 14

[Chris]

I am on "macOS High Sierra 10.13.6" and "Firefox Quantum 64.0 (64-bit)", which is where is observe the bug this ticket is about.

Only learned from your statement that there are different language versions of Firefox. I am using the default installed by brew. My system is generally in English. I'll try to install the German Firefox version through brew and report back.

Comment 15

[Chris]

I can confirm that cmd+ä/ö work when using the German release of Firefox. I installed it using `brew cask reinstall --language=de firefox`. So in case the expectation is for the short cut to only work in the language specific release, there is no bug.

It does not solve my problem though. I would like to keep my UI language English (because living in US, etc). Is there a way to change the interface language of the German release of Firefox to English?

Otherwise I'll have to choose between my preferred language or support for a back/forward shortcut.

Any suggestions how to proceed? Is this essentially a feature request or is my setup already considered as supported but broken?