1556154 - ESC should cancel address bar focus (Hitting Escape should return control to the webpage content)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[709922234]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. ctrl + l
2. input text
3. esc, esc

Actual results:

cannot cancel address bar focus

Expected results:

Refocus to page content

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I'll copy what Gijs said in bug 1400401, because I agree:

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #3)

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #2)

Hitting esc used to remove focus from the urlbar so that you could do things
like "hit spacebar to scroll the page".

It doesn't do this for me on 56 either. Has this just been broken a long
time? When did it work? I'm not aware of it ever doing this, tbh...

Comment 2

[Asif Youssuff]

Saw an interesting version of this request based on real world usage of a competing browser on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dx6y6t/opera_functions_in_firefox/f7ny367/

Say I'm in a tab typing something and can remember the word for something, usually, you do as you suggested, move cursor to search bar or open a new tab and goto google.

But with Opera quick search, I only have to press Alt+Space (which are right next to each other), to pop open a google search modal overlay where the cursor is focused in the search bar... I type and search... I see the word I'm trying to remember... I press Esc twice... my cursor is back to where it originally was in the tab.

So I did all that with only 4 key presses, without touching the mouse or needing to open or close a new tab. If you have Opera install, I urge you to try it out to see the benefit.

I think this could be accomplished with the usual control k/l shortcuts and hitting escape twice if this feature were to be implemented.

FYI liuche responded in bug 1400401 to:

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #3)

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #2)

Hitting esc used to remove focus from the urlbar so that you could do things
like "hit spacebar to scroll the page".

It doesn't do this for me on 56 either. Has this just been broken a long
time? When did it work? I'm not aware of it ever doing this, tbh...

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #4)

Hm, maybe this was never a feature then, and just a feature in my shortcut
keys addon...? I may have just never realized! I'll close it.

Comment 3

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

Hm, I wonder if an add-on could just provide a contextual menu option for the provided use case. It seems useful but not something affecting most users.
Even if we'd allow focus to escape back to content, after running a search your content would have changed, unless you only meant to look at search suggestions?
In any case to me it sounds like a dedicated add-on could do a better job at helping users finding words...
I concur with the initial P5 assessment.

Comment 4

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

And on a second thought, we are also quite close to a wontfix, because it may not be that uncommon for users to press ESC multiple times inadvertently to just undo the urlbar value, we'd give it a new functionality that may really break workflow.

Comment 5

[coughingmouse]

AFAIK only F6 toggles address bar focus.
Shouldn't at least Cmd + l cancel address bar focus as well, be it not for ESC?

Comment 6

[onuohaoluebube05]

Hello Marco, I would like to work this. Please do well to assign it to me.

Thanks

Comment 7

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

I'm sorry but this bug is not ready to be worked on, please refer to the list at https://codetribute.mozilla.org/projects/ff

Comment 8

[Md Masud]

its working now when browse for discountedship.com

Comment 10

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

This should be discussed with UX, and likely provide a pref.