308603 - Pageup [and PageDown] keys don't scroll page as expected on some webpages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 194937

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[venkat_is]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

In the above-mentioned URL, when I press PageUp key once, it scrolls down
properly. The next time I press, nothing happens. When I press the key one more
time, it either scrolls up or doesn't scroll the page at all.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the page and wait for completion (I've not tried on half-downloaded pages)
2. Press PageUp key 3 times and see the result.
Actual Results:  
THe page scrolled up on several occasions during the third press of the key

Expected Results:  
It should have scrolled down and reached the end of page.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Did you have caret browsing turned on when you did this? Press F7 to make sure
that caret browsing is turned off and then retest.

Comment 2

[charles_belov]

This appears to be a feature. Pressing F7 once gets rid of behavior #2.  I believe what happened to me is I set Tools  > Options > Advanced > General > Allow text to be selected with the keyboard, thinking, yeah, that's cool, without realizing it was going to change the behavior of the Page Up, Page Down, Cursor Up, and Cursor Down keys.  So it's technically not a bug, more of an end-user education thing (and possibly a cue for a documentation or implementation change).

Comment 3

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Well the Help documentation seems to be pretty clear on this. Do you have any specific suggestions as to what can be improved here? If you don't, close this bug as "INVALID".

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

Mike, can you design a better UI for turning on/off caret browsing? The way it stands now, people turn it on without realizing it (pressing F7) and then it stays on even the next time you launch. Lots of people make this mistake and continue surfing that way, meanwhile the keys don't work normally.

Comment 5

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

I don't think the problem here is that the reporter turned on Caret Browsing by accident with F7. The experience around that seems pretty decent, since it launches a modal confirmation dialog that alerts the user to what's happening. (I suppose we could add some sort of indicator on the status bar, though, but I doubt that anyone would notice it)

The problem seems to be that the option in the prefPane is pretty misleading. It currently reads:

 Accessibility 
   [ ] Allow text to be selected with the keyboard

Even with it unchecked, however, I can select text with the keyboard just fine. The reporter indicated that he wanted to ensure he was able to do this, which is why he checked the option. What the option really does is turn on Caret Browsing mode. I would suggest that we change the option to read:

 Accessibility
   [ ] Use caret browsing to control the cursor in web pages

Comment 6

[Fox2]

confirmed -- clarification is needed. 

I was checking if this was a bug too... having set tools --> options thinking "select text sounds a good thing I use a lot" and not realising it would play games with navigation controls (eg on wikipedia articles).

At the least, this needs some kind of warning popup "selecting this option can interfere with navigation", or its behavior needs to be reassessed so navigation controls aren't "broken" by it.

The problem seems to be that when it's in "select" mode, it only works within divs, or sections, or some such (sorry, Im no extert at this!). So controls like page up/down, or home/ctrl-home etc, stop at that section.

I would have thought that was undesirable behavior on any score, whether selecting text or navigating?

Apologies for the amateur's view but hope this helps.

Comment 7

[Mark Mason]

This is true with Mac OS X as well. The page-up and page-down keyboard commands sometimes fail. by giving a keyboard command to Go To Bottom of Page or Go to Top of Page, jogs Firefox back into functional page-down/up.

Comment 8

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

This will be fixed by bug 194937, which will show the caret browsing status in the statusbar and will make the F7 shortcut temporary.  See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194937#c24

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 194937 ***