454092 - Cmd-? does not open menu search/help search in Mac OS X

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 417720

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Mason]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1

In most Mac OS applications, cmd-? (cmd-shift-/) opens a search bar that searches all menu items as well as help items.  In FF 3, it opens a the webpage at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+Help?style_mode=inproduct in a new tab.  This is against the convention in Mac OS and less than helpful.

Firefox in particular would benefit tremendously from having the cmd-? menu bar search available from a hotkey, since it allows the user to search history and bookmarks.  Users who need the help page can still access it from the Help menu bar heading.  It doesn't seem likely that users will miss the help menu if they are looking for help, but many will miss the hotkeyed ability to search menu bar items.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  cmd-?
Actual Results:  
New tab is opened with the help page.

Expected Results:  
Opened the find-as-you-search menubar search feature of Leopard.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

cmd-? is *not* a general purpose search mechanism - it's used for *help*. See <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGMenus/chapter_17_section_4.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000356-TPXREF108>

This is normally some kind of help-viewer, and in Firefox this has always been a HTML page. It used to be stored in the application (shown as a modeless dialog box), but since Firefox 3 it's stored on the web (hence the tab). Some applications also use Spotlight to provide an interactive search, but this is limited to the help content itself.

Searching the web can be done in the search field on the right (shortcut: cmd-K) ; searching history and bookmarks used to be done in separate viewers, but is now done in the location bar (shortcut: cmd-L).

Comment 2

[Mason]

cmd-? "spotlight search for help" menus don't just search help, they also search all menu bar items.  cmd-L does not search all menu bar items, just bookmarks and history.  It's not the same.

Anyone who presses cmd-? in Mac OS is expecting to get the spotlight search-for-help bar and a keyboard navigable menu bar.  No one presses cmd-? expecting to see the help book pop up, because that never happens in a Mac app.  Help book spotlight search is what always comes up.  The convention for getting the help book to pop up is opt-cmd-?.  I understand Firefox doesn't have a searchable help book, but I stand by my bug.  Having the menu bar search on the hotkey is more useful than having the help page there, and, I believe, closer to expectations.

From the point of view of guys like me, that have a disability that makes mousing to the menu bars a chore, having the cmd-? hotkey not give me bar search is a significant problem.  However, reading over the documentation at the URL you provided, I see that it might not be easy to implement cmd-? as spotlight search unless you have a registered help book.  Is there some way to get the search bar as a hotkey in mac firefox?  Unfortunately, registering the "Search" menu command as cmd-? in Keyboard Pref Pane does not do it.  It will have to be something on the Firefox end of things.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Searching help should NOT return you data in other parts of an application (say, history and bookmarks in Firefox, or mails in Apple Mail), - it only searches through the help text (what used to be be shown in a help viewer in older versions). I don't see why you claim that it "searches all menu items".

Searching in spotlight (cmd-space or opt-cmd-space) will return you data in various documents (text documents, mails, ...), but does not search in your help texts (well, ignoring the case where spotlight found the actual document itself if it's saved in a *.txt document for instance). At this moment, Spotlight won't search in your history or bookmarks though (there's no interface yet), but it might soon be able to search in your mails (see bug 290057).

The shortcut for searching is now either cmd-L, cmd-K or cmd-F (or /), depending on what you search for (and cmd-? for the help). And sorry, currently keyboard shortcuts are not customizable. I agree that a common interface for spotlight would make it easier, but Firefox is not yet that good integrated in the Mac OS, unlike Camino.

Comment 4

[Mason]

cmd-? searches menu bar items.  Go to any mac app except firefox, and cmd-?.  Type something and you will see two types of spotlight results.  The first type of results are all the menubar items that contain a literal match for your search term.  E.G. in Mail.app, try cmd-? and type "mailbox".  You will see a category or results called menu items.  If you arrow down through the menu items, the menu item will be disclosed from the menu bar.  The second, and less used, category of results are the actual help topics from the Mail.app help book.

In firefox, bookmarks and history become menu bar items, which is why they would appear in cmd-?.  However, they are not why cmd-? is important.  cmd-? is important to access the menubar items that are not otherwise keyboard accessible.  This is important in two cases.  One, when a user needs to keyboard access a menu bar item for which he does not know the hotkey, or for which there is no hotkey.  The second case is when the user does not know exactly where the menu item he wants is hidden. 

The only other way to keyboard access a menu bar command that is not hotkeyed is to use ctrl-F2 to make the keyboard arrow key/FAYT accessible, but this is not as good.

Comment 5

[Daniel Luz]

I can confirm this bug, though the original description is a bit misleading. As Mason later said, the help search would/should only search what appears on the menus (as it currently does), so it's not really a good history search, but the point remains.

This is a very useful feature to reach menus which don't have shortcuts using only the keyboard, and for that one of my favorite aspects of OS X when it comes to keyboard accessibility. Firefox is the only application I know which "blocks" it by binding this shortcut to something else.

Comment 6

[Thomas K. (:tom)]

Related to bug 253680?

Comment 7

[Mason]

Daniel: if you agree with this bug, perhaps you should vote it up.

Thomas:  I am not sure what VK_HELP is.  Reading that bug, it appears that the devs were having a hard time capturing the '?' char using ConvertMacToRaptorKeyCode.  Since cmd-? now does something, I assume that they figured out how to capture the ?.   This implies that VK_HELP is firefox's built in help website.  Rather, this is one of those 'bugs' where some jerk who doesn't develop for the project claims that, though things might be working as intended, they shouldn't be intended to work that way.

Comment 8

[Mason]

Also, it occurs to me that Apple makes it hard to capture ? specifically because they wish to preserve this functionality across all applications, since it is a great feature.

Comment 9

[Michael]

As a fellow Mac user of FF3, I'll chime in here and agree wholeheartedly with Mason. This break from convention is actually the single-most annoying thing in FF3; if it weren't such an annoyance, I would happily endorse it as the best browser on the OS X platform. At least having the option to use what we consider the proper behaviour to be (opening to the search bar in the help menu) would be nice.

Comment 10

[Timothée Boucher]

I'll add my support to Mason on this. I use this shortcut all the time in other applications and get annoyed every time I try it with Firefox. As an example of use, I'll mention Photoshop: if I want to access the command 'Crop', it's a lot faster to press cmd-? and then 'crop' than looking for it in the menus. As Mason mentioned, it's also useful for browsing history, recent documents... and works in all the applications with Leopard.

My opinion is that Firefox shouldn't take over that shortcut (it's the only app I know that does this) or *at least give an option to deactivate it*. The thing is that the Firefox help page is still accessible from the help menu and could even be access with cmd-?, down arrow, enter.

I suppose the idea behind that is to make the official help easily accessible from the keyboard but it doesn't work since the help page doesn't autofocus on the search field. So I press cmd-? and then I have to use my mouse to select the search field. Thus, taking over the shortcut doesn't make it any easier for people using keyboard shortcuts and makes it identical for people using the mouse.

Also, I think there were some confusion in some comments. cmd-? is not related to Spotlight, it gives a Spotlight-*like* interface to look for menu items as well as help documents, but doesn't go through the file system or anything like that.