320899 - Page Down/Up and Arrow Down/Up keys don't work as expected for page scrolling w/Adesso keyboard.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Joel Stevenson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Using an Adesso EKB 2100W keyboard Page Down/Up have no effect for scrolling a page, though will open/close the location history when text focus is in the location bar.
Arrow Down will initially jump to bottom of page ("End" key behavior) then stops working (along with Page Up) for scrolling altogether.

Behavior in form elements and other textual input boxes appears normal.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Plug in the noted Adesso keyboard
2.  Load any page that is longer than the browser window can display at once.
3.  Try Page Down and/or Arrow Down to scroll the page.

Actual Results:  
Page Down does nothing, no matter if I try to "force" focus on the page by clicking inside it or not.
Arrow Down usually jumps to the bottom of the page, as the "End" key would, after this it never seems to do so again and both Arrow Up and Down have no effect.

Expected Results:  
Page Down should scroll 1 page-length down, arrow down should scroll down by line. 

Using a standard Apple keyboard works fine in Firefox and the Adesso keyboard works fine in all other applications that I use.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Related to bug 261873 comment 12?

Comment 2

[Jamie]

same issue with Dell laptop - page up and down buttons do not page up or down - sometimes jump all the way to bottom/ top of page, sometimes just moves to another spot on visible screen

Comment 3

[Michael D. Beynon]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

I've been seeing this exact behavior using the built-in keyboard on my MacBookPro, and using an external Apple USB keyboard, so I don't think it's dependent on the Adesso keyboard.

Another symptom: if I start a textual search by using '/', then while the search has not timed out, the up/down/pgup/pgdn keys all work as expected.  After the timeout, it goes back to the incorrect behavior described in this bug.  For example, while viewing this bug page, typing '/show' will cause the find toolbar at the bottom of the browser window to appear, and up/down/pgup/pgdn all work to scroll the webpage.  Once the timeout occurs and the find toolbar disappears, the keys stop working.  I can again type '/show' and the process will continue.

Comment 4

[Michael D. Beynon]

With 1.5.0.6, I've stopped seeing this incorrect behavior, and Up,Dn,PhUp,PgDn work as expected.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6

Comment 5

[Marc Bejarano]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Another symptom: if I start a textual search by using '/', then while the
> search has not timed out, the up/down/pgup/pgdn keys all work as expected. 
> After the timeout, it goes back to the incorrect behavior described in this
> bug.  For example, while viewing this bug page, typing '/show' will cause the
> find toolbar at the bottom of the browser window to appear, and
> up/down/pgup/pgdn all work to scroll the webpage.  Once the timeout occurs and
> the find toolbar disappears, the keys stop working.

i was seeing the same thing in 1.5.0.7 under OSX 10.4.

i just spent far more time than i'd like to have figuring out this puzzle.  it turns out i had the accessibility.browsewithcaret pref turned on.  i have no clue how i did that, but i assume i (or my cat) pressed F7 at some point in the past and confirmed the confirmation box.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.browsewithcaret

does turning this feature off fix this for you folks?

Comment 6

[Joel Stevenson]

in reply to comment #5

You're absolutely right.  I don't know how I ended up with the browsewithcaret preference set to true, but changing that to false fixes the issue for me.  Many thanks for spending all that time to figure this one out.

Perhaps FF could have some sort of alert that notifies the user that accessibility.browsewithcaret is turned on if they try to move using page-up / page-down and the preference is indeed turned on?

Comment 7

[orville]

Where do I find the the accessibility.browsewithcaret preference?  I looked everywhere.  I have 1.5.0.7 and am on iMac G5 and neither the Apple keyboard nor the Kensington mouse's Page Up and Page Down keys have any effect.  Though Home and End have the desired effect.

It's a real issue for me.

Comment 8

[Joel Stevenson]

Apparently F7 is mapped to toggle this setting on and off.  If that doesn't work for you then you can also go to the about:config page and double click the option in the list.

Comment 9

[orville]

F7 did it! 

To think I've been struggling with this for over a year.  Thank you, folks!!

Comment 10

[David desJardins]

I think F7 did it for me too!  Yay!  But how many other people out there are afflicted with this?  And how can we help them?

Comment 11

[Marc Bejarano]

i'm sure there are many afflicted with this "feature".  joel's suggestion for some sort of UI indication that you are using this mode of firefox in comment #6 is a good one.

joel: want to file a new RFE bug about this?  if you do, please note the bug # here and reference this bug in your feature request.

marking as WFM as this behavior is as designed.

Comment 12

[Joel Stevenson]

It looks like FF 2.0 behaves correctly here - or at least I can't reproduce this bahavior on my machine in FF 2.0 - so I'll hold off on the RFE (is the 1.x tree only receiving security updates now?)

Comment 13

[Marc Bejarano]

what do you mean by "behaves correctly"?  do you mean that F7 doesn't turn on Caret Browsing mode?  that it does and there is now some sort of warning?

Comment 14

[Joel Stevenson]

I mean that caret mode doesn't appear to disable the page up and down keys in FF 2 like it did in 1.x.