405224 - Regression: New tabs steal keyboard from navigation

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Christiaan Hofman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b1) Gecko/2007110903 Firefox/3.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b1) Gecko/2007110903 Firefox/3.0b1

In the 3.0b1 build the new tabs get the keyboard focus when a tab is selected. It means that the keyboard cannot be used for navigation and scrolling. In the past you had to double-click the tab to put the keyboard foxus on the tab, which I believe is infinitely better. You should ask the question: what is more important, navigating/scrolling in the page, or switching tabs? I think the answer should be obvious. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a window with several tabs
2. Select a tab
3. Try to navigate or scroll using the keyboard
Actual Results:  
The shortcuts for the current page (navigation, scrolling, reload, etc) don't work. You can only switch tabs. 

Expected Results:  
Shortcuts for the current page should just work. 

Navigating in the page I'm reading (which are actions to take a lot) is infinitely more important than switching tabs (which are actions that are used sporadically). Now I need to select the page separately, usually even twice because the first click doesn't stick (which is a bug by itself). It's a definite regression from FF 2.x.

Comment 1

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

This WFM in the latest Minefield nightly: Clicking on a tab does not give the tab bar the focus; I am still able to scroll with the arrow keys afterwards.

Comment 2

[Christiaan Hofman]

Confirmed, this seems to be fixed in the latest nightlies.