396164 - Holding shift should cause same-letter searches within <select> to cycle in reverse order

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[Uli Stärk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

If you have a select with many many options (like country selection) you type the first letter of your selection and the scrolls down to the first match and selects it. By pressing the same key a couple of times you can go through all options with the same first letter.

It should be possible to traverse the list while pressing SHIFT in the reverse direction.

Like TAB switches the focus from input to input field and SHIFT + TAB reverses the focus-order.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Do other apps or native widgets behave this way, or is this just an idea you came up with on your own?

This might be confusing if someone uses shift intending to type a capital letter, perhaps because the item in the <select> appears capitalized.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

It doesn't act this way in standard Windows combos. We just try to behave like native widgets.

I agree with Jesse's comment about it being potentially confusing.

Therefore, suggest WONTFIX.

Comment 3

[Uli Stärk]

Well - I didn't check out other applications. I thought it was obvious, that other applications behave that way, because Shift has for me a reverse-function when dealing with forms. But as I just noticed - they don't :(

So set it to WONTFIX if you don't think this is a helpful feature. If you like you can create a configuration option, that allows enabling my described behavior.