1891876 - Element highlighter disappears when using keyboard navigation

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Inspector, enhancement, P3)

Description

[curtis.s.mcallister]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:125.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/125.0

Steps to reproduce:

Using the arrow keys to navigate the Inspector window—up/down to traverse the list, left/right to fold and unfold nodes

Actual results:

The element highlighter (I've also seen it called the box model highlighter) shows briefly on the webpage being inspected, but then disappears

Expected results:

The highlighter should remain visible while the Inspector panel is active and an element is selected in the panel.

Comment 1

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

I think this is handled at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/b94e479d0b79b157029379832d05229df646e134/devtools/client/inspector/markup/markup.js#1058-1062

Note that this is not only about keyboard navigation, anytime a node is selected in the markup view, we only briefly show the highlighter. I think this has been the case since the beginning, but not sure this was ever clearly discussed. The highlighter is both shown when selecting or when hovering a node. If we change this to make the highlighter persist when a node is selected in the markup view, we should probably still be careful and clear the highlighter when the user moves the mouse out of the ruleview.