1927304 - Ctrl+Shift+L Shortcut opens AI sidebar (and opts into AI sidebar lab experiment)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Asif Youssuff]

From https://mastodon.social/@Stanisable/113375594791628630

Hum, a recent #FirefoxNightly upgrade breaks a #Bitwarden extension's keyboard shortcut (ctrl + shift + L) to show AI chats in the sidebar. Even when "Chatbot AI" is disabled in preferences. Are you aware of that @FirefoxNightly ?

Steps to reproduce:

1. Press Control-shift-L

What happens:

I am opted into the AI chatbot experiment and a sidebar with a chatbot selection UI opens.

Expected result:

As before 1905027. I am not opted into the experiment, so the keyboard shortcut should work as previously (and like the user on Mastodon reported, allow existing user-configured extension shortcuts).

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1905027

:Mardak, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1905027, could you take a look? Also, could you set the severity field?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I'm hitting this as well. I've got Ctrl+Shift+L baked into my muscle-memory to trigger BitWarden's auto-fill, so I keep inadvertently opening this sidebar.

If I turn off the experiment in about:preferences (unchecking the checkbox), then Ctrl+Shift+L still opens the sidebar and re-checks-the-checkbox.

WORKAROUND NOTES, for folks-in-search-of-a-workaround: see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-extension-shortcuts-firefox -- as described there, you can view and reassign extensions' keyboard shortcuts, which lets you customize BitWarden to use a different shortcut for this action. I used that UI to delete a keybinding for another extension-action that I wasn't using and repurposed that keybinding for this.)

Comment 4

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

do we need to change this from cmd-shift-l? https://bitwarden.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts/ also uses cmd-shift-y that was another option from bug 1905027 comment 10, so if not those cmd-shift-u?

bug 1927324 says other password managers use this keyboard shortcut not just bitwarden although the bugs filed so far seem to be for that one

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #4)

if not those cmd-shift-u?

Ctrl+Shift+U isn't available (I had initially mentioned remapping it as a workaround in comment 2 since I noticed that BitWarden tried to coopt it for something else that I could unassign it from, but I didn't test it thoroughly at that point, so I ended up editing comment 2 to avoid suggesting this particular keybinding). On Ubuntu at least, Ctrl+Shift+U acutally brings up a system-level UI to enter special characters (U for Unicode I think): https://superuser.com/questions/358749/how-to-disable-ctrlshiftu

It's likely that any seemingly-available keybinding we might choose here (one that's not already used by us or by the OS) will collide with some extension or external tool.

To avoid breaking the flow for users-of-whatever-extension/tool-that-ends-up-being, we probably need to (at a minimum) only have our keybinding become active when the user has explicitly activated the AI-chatbot experiment in preferences. And in a future where the chatbot experiment graduates from labs to be default-enabled, we'd probably want to preserve a checkbox to turn it off (so as to let users of that extension regain their keybinding).

Comment 6

[Donal Meehan [:dmeehan]]

Regressor was backed out of central for Fx133
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1905027#c16

Comment 7

[mcortt]

Could you not just replace Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + I ? I doubt any extension uses it as it's a Firefox default for dev tools: F12 does the same thing.

Comment 8

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6780c421cf27c7941fbad92a000faddb922d68b8