330069 - Arrow keys increment scrollspeed during Autoscroll

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[mrbill7]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Requesting a feature for the arrow keys to be acceptable input during autoscroll.

Using the up or down arrow key would set the scroll speed.

At any point during an autoscroll, the up key decrements the downward scroll speed or increments the upward scroll speed. The down key decrements the upward scroll speed and increments the downward scroll speed.

Given a long page, this functionality increases manoeuvrability where the arrow keys control the scroll speed better than analog inputs (moving the mouse). Having the left & right arrow keys scroll in the same way would also be useful.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the middle-click to being autoscrolling.
2. Press any directional arrow key.

Comment 1

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

IMO it's too much complicated. If you want to scroll the page quickly, you can use the pag up / pag down keys, or you can set middlemouse.scrollbarPosition to true - read ihow it works here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Middlemouse.scrollbarPosition

Comment 2

[WulfTheSaxon [:Wulf]]

This should be parity-ie.

Comment 3

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

Anyway take into account that adjusting the scrolling speed with mouse in IE is quite hard. Scrolling a page with Firefox seems to me more easy.

Comment 4

[WulfTheSaxon [:Wulf]]

Regardless, there are times when I'd still rather use the keyboard. Reading a long ebook over at Project Gutenberg, for example. It's difficult to lean back from the computer and hold a mouse in your hand without accidentally moving it, but a keyboard works fine.

I don't see what detriment this could have, so I can't understand why it would be wontfix'd. IMHO, it at least deserves to be left open and set to future.

Comment 5

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> there are times when I'd still rather use the keyboard. [...] It's difficult 
> to lean back from the computer and hold a mouse in your hand without 
> accidentally moving it

Well, see my comment 1. You can also modify this settings, for example in this way:

user_pref("mousewheel.withaltkey.numlines", 5);

so if you have a mouse with a wheel, you can scroll the page pressing the ALT key more quickly.

Comment 6

[WulfTheSaxon [:Wulf]]

Actually, I was referring to the ability to sit back, set the scroll speed, and read a few chapters while autoscroll continues to scroll down for you without any intervention.

With a keyboard, you can just tap the up key when you want to pause for a moment (e.g. to look at an illustration or answer the phone). If you had a mouse in your lap, you'd inevitably accidentally nudge it and end up scrolling several pages in the wrong direction.

Comment 7

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

IMO using page up/down is more simple and it's less difficult to read, instead of a scrolling page. Anyway it could be of same utility. I remove my suggestion to wontfix.

Comment 8

[mrbill7]

As Wulf has related above, the original request is concerned mostly with setting a scroll speed via the keyboard and then being able to scan/read without touching anything.

Getting to the bottom or the top (while using alt is nice) is not as important as being able to have a consistent scroll speed as you're reading a page of any substantial length.

The tough part would be helping the user find their ideal scroll speed and starting with that speed each time they middle-mouse click on a page. 

Comment 9

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> The tough part would be helping the user find their ideal scroll speed and
> starting with that speed each time they middle-mouse click on a page. 
> 

This is not the behaviour of IE, and I don't know how Fx can do it. When you middle click the initial speed is zero obviously, since the mouse cursor has not defined the scroll direction either.

Comment 10

[mrbill7]

Nice to see the innovations over the past year, maybe ready for this one?

To answer the last reply, this is no request for some fanciful scroll speed calibration tool.

What FF still needs is a simple way to steadily scroll a page of any significant length. The original request is still asking for that: middle-click mouse, then sit back & use the up or down arrow keys once or twice to adjust how quickly the page scrolls. 

Eg, 1 down arrow keypress begins scrolling down at the slowest speed, the next down arrow keypress speeds up the scrolling & subsequent keypresses get to some maximum scroll speed.

Comment 11

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)