1976320 - [macos] Command+option+up and command+option+down keyboard shortcuts cannot be relied on by websites anymore

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Russell Johnston]

Bug 1965273 introduced command+option+up and command+option+down keyboard shortcuts for moving between tabs on macOS.

These keyboard shortcuts were already in use by web pages and apps. As far as I can tell from the diff, there is now no way for pages or users to opt back into using these shortcuts.

This is quite disruptive. These shortcuts also don't really even make sense when using horizontal tabs.

Could this change be made configurable? Or perhaps be made to apply only to vertical tabs? Or something along those lines?

Comment 1

[Kelly Cochrane [:kcochrane]]

:Gijs, is this something we should consider changing for vertical tabs only?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Apologies for the slow response, I was on vacation.

(In reply to Russell Johnston from comment #0)

As far as I can tell from the diff, there is now no way for pages or users to opt back into using these shortcuts.

re: pages: No, unfortunately. We don't want pages to be able to "lock" a user into a given tab by preventing normal tab switching shortcuts. There are of course something like 2-4 shortcuts already in use for tab switching and perhaps we could relax this restriction for some of them while maintaining "core" ones or something - but which shortcuts people expect / are used to depends heavily on the platform and app in which they first used tabs, so I'm not optimistic that we could choose/implement this correctly. Unfortunately there are a lot of sites that "steal" shortcuts that the browser uses in ways that are frustrating for users (esp. if the webapp calls preventDefault() but then doesn't do anything itself); ultimately the lack of user control over whether the page or the browser gets the shortcut is something that was built-in to the web standards at the start and we are still paying that price (though there have been some efforts to make it better, they don't provide immediate relief here...).

As for "users", there are several bugs on file to make all keyboard shortcuts fully user-customizable. This is something that I think we would like to do but is a non-trivial engineering and UX/product task in terms of ensuring that the behaviour is reasonable in various situations (tools/commands/shortcuts being removed, added, that causing conflicts, etc.).

These shortcuts also don't really even make sense when using horizontal tabs.

We consulted UX and accessibility folks before making this change, and they felt that in some situations, these shortcuts make more sense than the left/right ones, so we decided not to restrict the availability of the shortcut in this way. Likewise, the left/right shortcuts still work with vertical tabs, too. I'd also imagine that if you switched between tab layouts on different machines or screen sizes (e.g. adding/disconnecting other monitors), you'd want the shortcuts to be consistent and not change willy-nilly. So this aspect of the change was deliberate.

Could this change be made configurable? Or perhaps be made to apply only to vertical tabs? Or something along those lines?

For the reason above I don't think making the shortcut only work for vertical tabs would be a good idea.

Making an individual configuration for this shortcut is somewhat straightforward code-wise (a single about:config pref and a few lines of code), but scales extremely poorly (hundreds of shortcuts -- hundreds of conditionals and prefs) and is not discoverable (you may not be the only person annoyed by this change but not that many people would find the pref if it were introduced; adding it as a single visible setting in the main settings page is still not that discoverable and seems excessive for the size of the problem). People are understandably upset any time we introduce a new shortcut, change an existing one, remove an old one, etc. - the main issue is the overall lack of configurability, and I'd prefer to tackle that in one place / structurally, rather than on a whack-a-mole basis.

This is quite disruptive.

Can you give more details about this? What app/site is this causing issues with for you?

Comment 3

[Russell Johnston]

the main issue is the overall lack of configurability, and I'd prefer to tackle that in one place / structurally, rather than on a whack-a-mole basis.

That all makes sense, but I'm worried about this getting stuck in limbo for years while someone comes up with a more structural solution. This is a totally new shortcut to Firefox itself- surely there is some way to avoid breaking it in the mean time?

Can you give more details about this? What app/site is this causing issues with for you?

A big one is chat apps like Discord that use this to switch between severs/channels/whatever. Generally speaking this is common in any page that implements its own "vertical tab" like construct. Really the exact same arguments for supporting this shortcut for Firefox tabs apply here.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Russell Johnston from comment #3)

the main issue is the overall lack of configurability, and I'd prefer to tackle that in one place / structurally, rather than on a whack-a-mole basis.

That all makes sense, but I'm worried about this getting stuck in limbo for years while someone comes up with a more structural solution.

A different team is iterating on a prototype for the structural solution literally right now. So hopefully more like weeks to months (for Nightly / technical users like yourself, who would have been comfortable with about:config) rather than years - but I'm uncomfortable promising anything on behalf of other people not part of the conversation.

Can you give more details about this? What app/site is this causing issues with for you?

A big one is chat apps like Discord that use this to switch between severs/channels/whatever. Generally speaking this is common in any page that implements its own "vertical tab" like construct. Really the exact same arguments for supporting this shortcut for Firefox tabs apply here.

I don't use discord but I use element and slack, and both use opt-up/down arrow for this exact purpose, so there isn't a conflict. So I wonder how common this really is. Perhaps discord could be convinced to change the shortcut on macOS?

I defer to the triage folks for tabbed browser on how to proceed here, but personally I'm dubious about investing additional effort.

Comment 5

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

:Gijs, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1965273, could you take a look? Also, could you set the severity field?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte] from comment #5)

:Gijs, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1965273, could you take a look? Also, could you set the severity field?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

I did take a look, bugbot...

Comment 7

[Russell Johnston]

A different team is iterating on a prototype for the structural solution literally right now. So hopefully more like weeks to months (for Nightly / technical users like yourself, who would have been comfortable with about:config) rather than years - but I'm uncomfortable promising anything on behalf of other people not part of the conversation.

That would be great- is there anywhere I can track this work or should I just watch the release notes?

I don't use discord but I use element and slack, and both use opt-up/down arrow for this exact purpose, so there isn't a conflict. So I wonder how common this really is. Perhaps discord could be convinced to change the shortcut on macOS?

Discord already uses opt-up/down for channels within a server (and opt-shift-up/down to move between channels with unread messages). I'm sure they could come up with another one (if they cared enough about in-browser users on macOS) but does Firefox really need three immutable keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs?

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Russell Johnston from comment #7)

A different team is iterating on a prototype for the structural solution literally right now. So hopefully more like weeks to months (for Nightly / technical users like yourself, who would have been comfortable with about:config) rather than years - but I'm uncomfortable promising anything on behalf of other people not part of the conversation.

That would be great- is there anywhere I can track this work or should I just watch the release notes?

Unfortunately not at this stage - watching nightly release notes could work. I will try to remember to add a note here once there is an experimental solution.

I don't use discord but I use element and slack, and both use opt-up/down arrow for this exact purpose, so there isn't a conflict. So I wonder how common this really is. Perhaps discord could be convinced to change the shortcut on macOS?

Discord already uses opt-up/down for channels within a server (and opt-shift-up/down to move between channels with unread messages). I'm sure they could come up with another one (if they cared enough about in-browser users on macOS)

Yeah, fair.

but does Firefox really need three immutable keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs?

I don't actually ever spend money on gambling, but if I did, I'd lay you money that if I tried to remove any of the three, a bug would be filed by someone missing it...

I'm sorry I don't have a better answer right now. :-(