1662618 - Search suggestions require too many down arrow operations to be an amazing UX

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[tmaj]

Attachment: Firefox-SuggestionBox.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:79.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/79.0

Steps to reproduce:

I typed in a search term into the search box.

Actual results:

1. Suggestions appeared
2. One of them was exactly what I was after
3. I was happy
4. I realised I need to move my right hand to reach the down arrow to select the suggestion that is so close yet so far.
5. I felt frustrated
6. I engaged the arrow down button n times to select the n-th option.

Expected results:

I would be amazing to be able to do Alt+n/Ctrl+n/Fn/or similar to select the n-th suggestion. alt+j/k or alt+w/s for traversing the list would be amazing as well.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

you can page down, or use ALT+DOWN to go straight to the one-off search buttons. Other options are not supported atm.

I think the real solution here would be to improve the matching algorithm.
Though, I wonder if you wouldn't be happier moving history results at the top, did you check the "Show search suggestions before history" option in about:preferences#search? Does changing that help?

Comment 2

[tmaj]

I think the real solution here would be to improve the matching algorithm.
I disagree. I desire a better way to choose from the list. Yes, a better list could improve the experience, but it is not the real solution.

It just appeared to me that Alt+num could select the history/search suggestion while Alt+[a-z] could select the search engine to use - I'm mentioning this here because improving matching algorithm does not work, yet ;), for selecting which engine the user want to use. (Picture attached)

Though, I wonder if you wouldn't be happier moving history results at the top, did you check the "Show search suggestions before history" option in about:preferences#search? Does changing that help?
Good tip, but this doesn't address my core issue - that in a situation where the first item on the list you need to scroll the list using buttons that are not optimal for touchtyping.

Please note that nothing is broken, I'm just yearning for brilliance for all cases of results.

Comment 3

[tmaj]

Attachment: Firefox - Annotation 2020-09-03 140757.png