237123 - Cursor should react to accel and shift keys where appropriate

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Basson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

Background:
Currently the only way to visibly distinguish how a page hyperlink will react to
clicking is by reading the text in the status bar, which may not be very
intuitive - or indeed mean anything at all to the end-user.

There are already bugs filed to cover these issues:
Bug 90213 - Specific mousepointer when hovering mouse over a mailto: link
Bug 14027 - Indicate whether a link will open in a new window
Bug 169678 - Cursor shape should reflect the type of link hovered on (e.g.
pop-up/download/mailto...) (different cursors for links to new windows)

However, regular hyperlinks can be opened using the accel and shift keys, and
even if the bugs mentioned above are fixed, there will be no visual indication
that the accel or shift keys will change the behaviour of clicking on the hyperlink.

Proposal:
The functionality above should be added to, allowing the cursor to react to the
accelerator keys for regular hyperlinks. Ideally, when an accel or shift key is
held, the appropriate cursor (new window, new tab & if feasible - new active
tab) should be shown when hovering over a hyperlink.

If a user is already hovering over a hyperlink and a combination of these keys
is pressed, the cursor should change to reflect this.

I'm filing this due to the comments by Paradox52525 in the following MozillaZine
thread: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=60795
"It would make the new tab/window hotkeys a bit less crpytic to new users, and
IMO anything that provides more user feedback is good (as long as it's not
intrusive)."

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Ben Basson]

This bug is now a lot more viable, due to:
1. cursor styles being applied dynamically, not requiring mouseout/mouseover
2. the implementation of cursor: url()

An example of the desired behaviour (i.e. the enhancement as filed):
http://www.cusser.net/misc/firefox/cursor/testcase.html

Comment 2

[Ben Basson]

Attachment: Mock-up with HTML/JS

A zipped mock-up of the idea for your reviewing pleasure.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 208558 [details]
Mock-up with HTML/JS

Definitely like the approach, but we'd need some icon work. cc'ing alex faaborg, who's likely to be very interested in this.

Comment 4

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>cc'ing alex faaborg, who's likely to be very interested in this.

Yes, I also like the approach, and I'm very interested in this :)

We will need to get some platform specific cursor files (for instance on Vista the hand changes from having a soft grey gradient to all white in the example).  But we can take care of creating those files when we are creating the rest of the icons for the next release, feel free to use the ones you currently have for now.

cc'ing Colin to find out what it would take to get this working on OS X.