433415 - Keyboard events are inconsistent across platforms

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 599887

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

Description

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Try pressing and holding 'a' and ESC in different browser (Safari nighlty over 3.1)

Given a textarea that has keydown, keypress and keyup events, different events are fired on Mac and Windows when the user holds down a key.

On Windows keydown and keypress repeat.  On mac only keypress repeats.  What is worse is that calling event.preventDefault in keydown prevents the text input on Windows but not on Mac.

This is very inconsistent with other browser and it is even inconsistent between the same Firefox version across different platforms.

I suggest the following:

1. Both keydown and keypress repeats for all platforms.  
2. Only keys that generate text fires keypress (escape is an exception due to compatibility reasons)
3. Calling preventDefault on keydown prevents text from being outputted and prevents keypress from being fired.

Following these 3 rules will make keyboard handling a lot simpler for a lot of  applications.

Comment 1

[Erik Arvidsson]

Clarification: A or ESC.  Not a and escape at the same time.

Comment 2

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Both keydown and keypress repeats for all platforms.  
Is the current behavior on Mac a regression?
Is the behavior the same on FF2 and FF3?

> 2. Only keys that generate text fires keypress (escape is an exception due to
> compatibility reasons)
This is something that might eventually be defined in DOM 3 Events.
I think the better would be to always fire keypress, except with alt,shift,ctrl,capslock,numlock,...
Windows-gecko gets this right, I think.

> 3. Calling preventDefault on keydown prevents text from being outputted and
> prevents keypress from being fired.
This would change also the Windows behavior and this depends on what we think
is the default handling behavior for keydown event. This suggests that it is
to dispatch keypress, but on Windows-gecko it has for a long time been
to prevent keypress's default handling.

I agree that Gecko should behave the same way on all platforms.

Key handling in different browsers varies a lot. Gecko has its old traditions 
and changing those is *very* regression-risky. Webkit tries to emulate IE,
usually successfully, but for example with IME some strange events are 
dispatched. Opera does something else.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.

Comment 4

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Olli, do you think we can close this now? When I tried the test case on OSX, and held down a key, I got repeated keydown until I released the key, then I got a single keyup. This was for both a and escape, and was the same across Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

Comment 5

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I didn't see keypress events at all.

Comment 6

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

Oh, this was fixed in bug 599887.