462761 - Message Reader: Focused hyperlinks in msgs (with dotted border) should be copyable with Ctrl+C (if there is no text selected/highlighted)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: TB3a3

In message reader, when you place the cursor inside a hyperlink caption, e.g. a mailto: link, that link will be focussed (indicated by dotted frame). Pressing Enter will open that link. In the same situation, it would be comfortable if I could just press Ctrl+C to copy the URI of the link, without having to go into context menu.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Place cursor on hyperlink inside an email, don't highlight anything
2. Press Ctrl+C, or try Edit > Copy
3.
Actual Results:  
Nothing; Edit > Copy is grayed out

Expected Results:  
The URI underlying the hyperlink should be copied, as from a user's pov, the hyperlink has already been "selected" (focus indicator: dotted line).
There is nothing else you could copy in that situation, so no dangers involved.
(IMO, copying the underlying URI makes more sense than copying the title/caption of the link. However, one might consider copying the underlying email adress only for mailto:links rather than copying the full mailto:link.)

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I'd appreciate some sort of opinion on this.

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Brian ^^^ ?

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We're actually following what Firefox does here (Though I expect this would be a separate UI issue). What is available is right-click and copy link location, which if I remember correctly can be brought up by a keyboard shortcut.

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I can see this as being useful and I'm not sure that I'm sold on the described behaviour around choosing the underlying URI vs. the actual hyperlink.  I can't see that picking the URI or the actual selected link is the obvious expected behavior.  As mark points out there is already a keyboard shortcut to bring up the right click menu so I'm not inclined to avoid this change in favour of simplicity.  I'll leave it up to the devs to decide as I don't think this will have a negative impact on user experience; likely a small set of joyful people. :)