340365 - arrow keys and pgup/pgdown focus problems

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Edward Elliott]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060418 Firefox/1.0.8 (Ubuntu package 1.0.8)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060418 Firefox/1.0.8 (Ubuntu package 1.0.8)

The up/down arrow keys and page up/page down keys for scrolling the page don't work when the focus is on the url pane or the search box.  This frequently happens when opening a new page or when switching to another app and switching back to firefox.  When focus is in the url pane, the keys mentioned scroll through the url history, and in search they scroll through the search history.  

This is bad bad bad design.  99.9% of the time that people hit the arrows and pgup/down, they want to scroll the content of the page.  The few times they want to scroll the history, they can click the pane to open it up.  Modal inputs break work flow, requiring one to needlessly click or tab to the content pane before scrolling works as it should.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. load page
2. focus in url pane
3. hit keys


Actual Results:  
hilarity ensues

Expected Results:  
scroll the freaking page!

Comment 1

[Philip Withnall (unavailable)]

Can you reproduce this in an official Mozilla build of Firefox?

Comment 2

[Peter Kasting]

I can confirm in 1.5.0.4 on windows, but I suggest WONTFIX.  This seems like a good behavior to allow a user to navigate autocomplete etc. without using the mouse, and it feels much more intuitive than scrolling the page when focus is explicitly not ANYWHERE in the page, but rather in browser chrome.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

I vote for wontfix too.  If focus is landing in the address bar when it shouldn't, that's a bug, not something to be worked around.

Comment 4

[Philip Withnall (unavailable)]

I should've said before that I believe in WONTFIX. The current behaviour has been decided upon before, for good reasons (such as the ones mentioned before).

WONTFIXing.

Comment 5

[Edward Elliott]

The problem gets even worse in the latest 1.5.0.4, where the tab index can now grab the focus and hitting the down arrow changes tabs to an entirely new page.  This behavior is wrong, modal dialogs are confusing and annoying.  Ask yourself what percentage of the time you want to arrow up/down in the location or search box, and how often you want to scroll the page.  Optimize for the common case.  Keyboard navigation is great, but don't sacrifice usability to achieve it.

If you don't want to remove the current arrow/page functionality, at least make it so the location box, search box, and tab index never get focus unless explicitly given it.  When the user hits enter after typing a url or search term, focus should shift to the page content.  Using Tab key to navigate the page should never put focus on location/search box or the tab index.  When the window gains focus or a dialog closes, the content pane should always have the focus.  If you make those changes, you eliminate this bug while preserving keyboard navigation.

Comment 6

[Philip Withnall (unavailable)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> If you don't want to remove the current arrow/page functionality, at least make
> it so the location box, search box, and tab index never get focus unless
> explicitly given it.

If you want this to happen and *there are no bugs about it already* feel free to open another bug report. :-)