359950 - Need option to revert to old accesskey behaviour (Alt+Letter)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Timwi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

An option is needed to allow users to activate website accesskeys by pressing Alt plus the accesskey character (Firefox 1.5 behaviour).

Reasons:
(1) The current behaviour is less convenient.
(2) Assuming a US keyboard layout, the current behaviour makes it impossible to navigate to elements whose accesskey is any of -, =, [, ], ;, ', ,, ., / (which includes Wikipedia to name only one extremely popular example).
(3) Firefox strives to be customisable.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Simon Bünzli]

> (2) Assuming a US keyboard layout, the current behaviour makes it impossible to
> navigate to elements whose accesskey is any of -, =, [, ], ;, ', ,, ., /

That's bug 357101 (but will probably be fixed in bug 351310).

> (3) Firefox strives to be customisable.

It is. Just not through the user interface, where it strives to be as clean and simple as possible. Try navigating to about:config and set ui.key.contentAccess to 4. -> WORKSFORME

If you want to ask for UI for this option, feel free to reopen (and be prepared to have the bug WONTFIXED in the near future).