Open Bug 1691869 Opened 5 years ago Updated 8 months ago

Can't autoscroll by middle-clicking on links (if middle-click on links has been disabled via opentabfor.middleclick hidden pref)

Categories

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect, P5)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Tabbed Browser
Version:
Firefox 85
Platform:
Desktop
All
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: kawalecld, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [eng-implementation-ready])

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Steps to reproduce:

  1. In about:config, set browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick to false.
  2. If middlemouse.openNewWindow is set to true, set to false. (If you cannot see it, add it as a boolean.)
  3. Turn Autoscroll on (Options -> Use autoscrolling)
  4. Middle click on a link (hyperlink or other)

Actual results:

Autoscroll did not activate; instead, with the config settings listed above, nothing happens.

Expected results:

Autoscroll should have activated; with the above config settings, Autoscroll should just activate, no matter whether you are on a link or not.

Component: Untriaged → Tabbed Browser

Alternatively, just implement bug 390105. This would prevent any clicking at all in the page, thereby solving this bug as well.

Either way: Currently, in Autoscroll's current state, it is impossible to activate Autoscroll on some websites. They can potentially have no scroll bar and clickable elements that take up the entire page, thereby rendering it impossible to activate Autoscroll.

I think this is a rather important bug and should be fixed as soon as possible.

Severity: -- → S3
Priority: -- → P2
See Also: → 390105

Thanks for adding this issue. I'll set the flags accordingly so that the corresponding team has a starting point for this. Please do not hesitate to modify them if you think it is appropriate.

Severity: S3 → --
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Priority: P2 → --

An example when not being able to enable autoscrolling by middle-clicking on links presents a problem is Google image search page: pretty much all the space there is taken up by images which are formatted as links, and in order to enable autoscrolling one has to aim at image borders, which is quite inconvenient.

Duplicate of this bug: 1986913
Summary: Can't Autoscroll on links → Can't autoscroll by middle-clicking on links
See Also: → 1986297

This doesn't seem related to disabling autoscroll by default on macOS - just the fact that both bugs are about autoscroll is not enough - there are 85 open autoscroll bugs I see in bugzilla, it's not useful to link all of them.

Type: enhancement → defect
OS: Unspecified → All
Hardware: Unspecified → Desktop
See Also: 1986297 →
Summary: Can't autoscroll by middle-clicking on links → Can't autoscroll by middle-clicking on links (if middle-click on links has been disabled via opentabfor.middleclick hidden pref)

I'd review a patch - the code in https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/5ea04164ef9f7e0d2baf2afc34edac30e79f78bd/toolkit/actors/AutoScrollChild.sys.mjs#51-55 would need adjusting to check the opentabfor.middleclick pref, and we'd want an automated test - I don't have time to pick up the work right now. I imagine very few people disable browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick.

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mak, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Flags: needinfo?(mak)

low impact on small user base, would take a contributed patch and the approach is outlined in comment 6

Severity: -- → S4
Flags: needinfo?(mak)
Priority: -- → P5
Whiteboard: [eng-implementation-ready]
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