350115 - Timeout for <select> incremental search is confusing / bad for accessibility

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[CPK Smithies]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6

Given a <select> element such as the following:

<select size="1">
 <option>aaa</option>
 <option>aba</option>
 <option>bcc</option>
</select>

and, supposing the element is displayed in Firefox and currently has the focus, then if the user types "a" and then "b" in that order, the element displayed will be different depending on the speed with which the user types. If quickly, then the "incremental search feature" engages and the second <option> element is selected. If slowly, then the "incremental search feature" times out and the third <option> element is selected.

Reproducible: Always




This inconsistency is unkind to slow, disabled and temporarily distracted typists.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I can't really imagine what there is to do about it, other than the usual "make INCREMENTAL_SEARCH_KEYPRESS_TIME pref-controlled, though Firefox won't ever expose UI for the pref."

Comment 2

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

philor's idea of making INCREMENTAL_SEARCH_KEYPRESS_TIME be preference-controlled sounds like a good idea. Even if it won't be exposed in the UI, at least users who need it will be able to change it in about:config.