157669 - Internet Explorer Alt+D keyboard accelerator compatibility

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Steven Ehrbar]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530
BuildID:    20020530012

It would be useful for both functionality and for easing conversion from
Internet Explorer if the IE Alt+D keyboard accelerator was implemented in
Mozilla.  In IE (and in the Windows UI generally), Alt+D selects the text in the
address bar (text entry portion of the navigation toolbar), allowing quick entry
of a new URL.

Comment 1

[Philip White]

F6 places focus into the address bar.
Presently, Alt-D opens the "Debug" drop-down menu that's present in all
nightlies... perhaps Alt-D could be bound to the address bar in releases, since
I presume that it's not assigned to anything when Debug and QA menus aren't present.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

Accel+L is our equivalent, which maps to Ctrl+L on your platform.

Alt letters on Window are used for accesskeys - items where the prompt has the
accesskey underlined. We're consistent about this. For Alt+D to work, we'd write
"A_d_dress:" before the URL bar to make it discoverable to the user. I don't
think we'd do it otherwise. We might display the Accel+L shortcut in the URL
bar's tooltip, though.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

I think we should add this shortcut before adding the text "Address:" to the
left of the address field.  Adding the text may require fixing bug 49543, but in
the meantime, any user who tries Alt+D is probably an IE user who expects it to
focus the address field.  "Alt+D doesn't work" is a common complaint from IE users.

Fixing *this* bug probably depends on fixing bug 64606.

Comment 4

[:deanis74]

Don't use an Alt shortcut for this field.  Then users will be confused when
pressing Alt+D doesn't focus the field because there's an element on the current
page that has accesskey="d" defined.  With a Ctrl shortcut, this is much less
likely.

Comment 5

[Steven Ehrbar]

Okay.  I still think the alt-d combo would be useful for those who switch, but
reasons to do it otherwise make sense.

However, I'd like to know what to put in a userHTMLBindings.xml to make alt+d
work like ctrl+l, since my users are not happy with "use F6 or ctrl+l"

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

English-language sites rarely use accesskey=D because Internet Explorer uses
Alt+D for focusing the address bar.

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

I agree with Jesse. In addition, as in IE, a page with Alt+D for the accesskey
will still work. In that case the page accesskey takes precedence.

Jesse, will you own this?

Comment 8

[Aaron Leventhal]

I have a patch for this.

Comment 9

[Aaron Leventhal]

Attachment: Adds accesskey in XUL, also adds xul:textbox to nsBoxFrame.cpp's list of xul tags that can have accesskey

Seeking r=

Comment 10

[Aaron Leventhal]

Attachment: Shows that content with an accesskey of D overrides the address bar accesskey of D

Comment 11

[:deanis74]

Comment on attachment 99922 [details]
Shows that content with an accesskey of D overrides the address bar accesskey of D

I don't get this.  Where is Accel+L defined, shouldn't Alt+D be in a similar
place?

Comment 12

[Aaron Leventhal]

Dean, I thought about that, but I decided to do it as an accesskey, because a
content accesskey="D" need to override this. We get that for free this way.

Comment 13

[Aaron Leventhal]

Attachment: Oops, forgot to include _D_ebug -> Deb_u_g change

Comment 14

[:deanis74]

Comment on attachment 100438 [details] [diff] [review]
Oops, forgot to include _D_ebug -> Deb_u_g change

>+  <menu id="debugMenu" accesskey="U" label="Debug">

Change the accesskey to "u".  We do a case-sensitive match first and only if we
don't find anything do we do a case-insensitive match.

r=me with that change, although I'd like to get Jag's OK on the nsBoxFrame.cpp
addition.

Comment 15

[Samir Gehani]

Comment on attachment 100438 [details] [diff] [review]
Oops, forgot to include _D_ebug -> Deb_u_g change

r=sgehani

Comment 16

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Comment on attachment 100438 [details] [diff] [review]
Oops, forgot to include _D_ebug -> Deb_u_g change

sr=hewitt

Comment 17

[Aaron Leventhal]

checked in

Comment 18

[:deanis74]

Was this checked in a few days ago?  It works for me using 2002100108.  If so,
I'll verify it.

Comment 19

[Aaron Leventhal]

Yes Dean, I just forgot to mark it fixed.

Comment 20

[:deanis74]

OK, good.  Things are normal in the world again.  Verified fixed on Win2K using
2002100108.

Comment 21

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

congrats. You have broken every localization that wants to use "d" as a menu
accesskey.  Like the German one, where "d" is the only sensible accesskey for
the File menu.  I should not that IE/German does _not_ have Alt-d focus the URL
bar, precisely for this reason.  Too bad you hardcoded the accesskey so that
localizers can't change it, huh?  This is what we have DTD files for, people!