1596264 - Complete autofilled urls with the TAB key

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Mike Milano]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

I'm a web developer and rely on autocomplete in the address bar a lot. It would be incredibly helpful if tab worked more like the right arrow, advancing to the next suggested directory.

Instead, the tab key completes the entire URL with some random entry from your history. Even when it's not auto-suggesting a URL yet, hitting tab drops in a magic destination you weren't expecting.

If a user is typing in the address bar, they are trying to get somewhere specific. Autocomplete based on history is fantastic, but advancing to the next section/directory suggested requires you to lift your right hand and press the right arrow.

Using tab to do this would be much more useful. If it's just people like me who would appreciate that, a setting for this behavior would be nice to have.

Actual results:

• I am trying to get to https://github.com/mozilla/firefox

• I type git

• github.com appears in autocomplete with my caret position still just after git

• I hit the tab button

• It completes the URL with something I don' t want based on an item in my history

• I try again but instead of hitting tab, I hit the right arrow button.

• Firefox completes the URL to https://github.com/

• I type moz

• Firefox autocompletes https://github.com/mozilla/, with my caret still just after moz

• I want to press tab, but instead I have to lift my hand off the keyboard again to complete that section of the URL

Expected results:

When typing a URL in the address bar, the tab key should behave like the right arrow key.

• I am trying to get to https://github.com/mozilla/firefox

• I type git

• Firefox autocompletes https://github.com/ with my caret position still just after the git

• I hit the tab button

• Firefox advances the carret to the right of http://github.com/

• I type moz

• Firefox autocompletes https://github.com/mozilla with my caret position still just after moz

• I hit the tab button

• Firefox autocompletes https://githubcom/mozilla/ just as if I pressed the right arrow button.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Andre Klapper]

You can use Enter to select and go to the first proposal. You can use arrow+down to select the first proposal.

Comment 3

[Mike Milano]

Thanks Andre, but I think you misunderstood. I want to be able to run all the steps I mentioned before going to any URL, so enter would not solve this and lifting your hand back and forth from the arrow keys is what I'm trying to avoid.

Comment 4

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

in Firefox (and Chrome too) TAB moves through results, that's why we complete with the right arrow.

We could probably consider completing with TAB when there's an autofilled entry, but we must also try to not break muscle memory of users.
From the latest telemetry we collected the percentage of users moving through results with tab is very small, so imo it'd be ok, but this enters the same territory of bug 1437524. These habits are things people are very vocal about.

So, Imo tab should indeed complete if there's autofill, or move to one-off buttons otherwise (Bug 1437524), but not everyone in the team agrees with my assessment.

Comment 5

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

I think someone could try implementing the alternate TAB behavior behind a pref, so that we can test and users can set it according to their preference.