1565579 - Highlighting an address bar URL while holding shift should remove the dropdown of suggestions

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Chris Midgley]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

0. Go to the url "example.com", so it's populated in the history
1. Enter "example" in the address bar. It should now look like "example.com/" with ".com" highlighted
2. Hold shift and press left four times. It now looks like "example.com/" with "." highlighted (in version 67, it would have looked like "example.com/" with "com/" highlighted)
3. Without releasing shift, press delete

Actual results:

example.com is removed from the URL suggestions

Expected results:

The highlighted text is deleted

This is something I have muscle memory for from the versions previous to 68: I think the above description is what I'm doing. In e.g. version 67 pressing shift and moving left and right removes the dropdown selection of possible URLs, so you can't accidentally remove one from being suggested.

This style might be better -- saves having to hit "down" in the case you want to delete a URL you're modifying -- but it's different to how it was before and I've already deleted a couple of suggestions by accident.

Comment 1

[Chris Midgley]

I've figured out what I'm doing when I delete them by accident -- I highlight a URL, then hit end -> shift+home -> delete (to clear the URL bar again), but I'm still holding shift when I press delete. Previously, the shift+home step closed the dropdown of possible URLs, so it didn't matter that I was still holding shift when I hit delete. Now it does.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

shift+delete removes an entry from history

Comment 3

[Chris Midgley]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #2)

shift+delete removes an entry from history

I know, and I like that there's the ability to do that in the address bar. But in versions before 68, if you highlighted a address bar suggestion and then moved left or right, it would be deselected. Now it's not. So, previously hitting shift+delete in that circumstance (e.g. following the process in comment 1) just deleted the text, because there was no history entry highlighted, but now it deletes the history entry and the text. I've already done this accidentally a couple of times, and there's no way to undo it (that I'm aware of).

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

yes, it's because we don't close anymore the panel on keyboard navigation. that was a deliberate choice, that indeed forced us to add SHIFT to the old DELETE command. Your case is unfortunately the kind of edge case that it's hard to manage, the only way would be to change shift+del to something else (ctrl+del for example), but that would mean breaking all the users again :(

Maybe we should limit SHIFT+DEL to only act when there's no selection, it may break other use cases though. It's something to evaluate.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

let's get a second opinion.

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

There are a few things here:

Starting in 68, shift-delete does remove from history, but not for the first result (which we call the "heuristic" result). Shift-delete now removes only history results, whereas before it was possible to "remove" any kind of result, even results that aren't truly removeable like search suggestions and the heuristic result. So I'm confused by the steps in the comments above, because according to them, only the heuristic result is ever selected.

When I do the steps in comment 0, the popup shows "http://examplecom/ -- Visit". My visit to example.com isn't removed. I can type it and it autofills, and when I type "ample" I see it in the popup.

Now, if I do type "ample", arrow down to select the example.com result, shift-home to select all text in the input, and then shift-delete, example.com is removed from my history. I'm guessing that's what you've ended up doing sometimes? I agree with Marco that it might be an unfortunate edge case. For a while now, UX has wanted the popup to remain open when you move the caret in the input, so that's why we changed that.

I like Marco's idea about triggering history removal only when text isn't selected. Seems like a good idea to me, although it risks introducing confusion if you don't understand what's going on: shift-delete sometimes removes from history and sometimes doesn't.

(In reply to midgleyc from comment #0)

2. Hold shift and press left four times. It now looks like "example.com/"
   with "." highlighted (in version 67, it would have looked like
   "example.com/" with "com/" highlighted)

Interesting, I'm not sure why it's different. The old behavior seems totally wrong to me. The new behavior is what happens if ".com/" had been highlighted by placing the caret before the "." and then selecting to the end.

(In reply to midgleyc from comment #3)

entry highlighted, but now it deletes the history entry and the text. I've
already done this accidentally a couple of times, and there's no way to undo
it (that I'm aware of).

fwiw you can visit the URL again and it should be added back to your history. Not a great undo, I know, especially if the URL isn't memorable or easy to get to.

Comment 7

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #6)

Not a great undo, I know

We could also actually add the history removal to the undo stack so at least you could truly undo it, at least if you knew it was possible. And we could do that regardless of whatever other changes we do or don't make to address this. Although the interaction with the textbox's undo stack might be a pain, or confusing.

Comment 8

[Chris Midgley]

(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #6)

Now, if I do type "ample", arrow down to select the example.com result, shift-home to select all text in the input, and then shift-delete, example.com is removed from my history. I'm guessing that's what you've ended up doing sometimes? I agree with Marco that it might be an unfortunate edge case. For a while now, UX has wanted the popup to remain open when you move the caret in the input, so that's why we changed that.

Yes, I've been arrowing down. Sorry for the confusion. I misinterpreted what was happening in the example: I thought shift-delete would remove it from the history (and so be an example for this bug), but it doesn't in this case.

fwiw you can visit the URL again and it should be added back to your history. Not a great undo, I know, especially if the URL isn't memorable or easy to get to.

You can re-add the URL to the history, but it doesn't add back all the frecency data -- so if it was previously one of the top results because you'd visited it a lot, it's now not. This is the unfortunate bit.

Comment 9

[James Teow [:jteow]]

This bug might be able to fixed after we introduce a menu for each URLbar result that has a more user friendly way of removing the item from the list.