475358 - F1 opens tabs a little too easy

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

F1 opens a tab for help, but if you hold it down for just a second too long, you get like 5 tabs.

We should detect the F1 repeat flag and not continue to open tabs.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Confirmed on Linux. OS --> All.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090629 Minefield/3.6a1pre

Comment 2

[u88484]

http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/08/18/cats-love-firefox-support/
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/02/06/analytics-and-firefox-support/
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/02/19/how-do-firefox-users-use-firefox-support/

Reading those articles shows that SUMO has a huge bounce rate and the first article explains that cats seem to be a big culprit from stepping on the keyboard (I can definitely vouch for this as my cats do this all the time and I come back with dozens of SUMO tabs opened).

I believe detecting the F1 repeat flat would help this situation out a lot and save mozilla some bandwidth and users from having to close lots of uneeded tabs.

Comment 3

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Indeed, this would be very good to fix. 

As a side-note, we're about to launch another test that will see how the bounce rate differs between people hitting F1 vs people choosing Help from the menu. If it turns out that the bounce rate for F1 is well over 90%, I would argue for the removal of the F1 key bound to Firefox Help altogether.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Actually, upon looking, this is more pervasive than I thought.

You just have to find the right shortcuts.

Ctrl+T to open tab. over a second. a zillion tabs.
ctrl+W to close a tab. over a second. lose all your tabs.

I'd be really curious to see how other apps behave in this regard. With shortcut keys in particular, are repeat codes ignored?

Comment 8

[Kari Halsted]

+1 for fixing. My cat is also my use case.

A sampling of apps that open Help *one* time, regardless of how long you hold down F1:
- Eclipse IDE (on Windows)
- Internet Explorer 8
- Word
- Photoshop

On the other hand, Windows XP opens lots of help windows if you hold down F1, so FF is as least as good as Windows in this matter. :)

Comment 9

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This isn't really keyboard navigation, but I agree that we should fix. Is there a simple F1 repeat flag that we can listen for?

Comment 10

[Bartosz Wucke]

Please note by assigning Bug 484654 as duplicate of this, you have reduced the severity. Bug 484654 is critical, and not without reason - on Linux holding down F1 for 10s or so causes total browser freeze. On Windows - long enough causes crash. This is NOT just a matter of aesthetics and discomfort.

Comment 12

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

F1 doesn't do anything at all anymore. Was that on purpose?

Comment 13

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

F1 no longer opens help so this isn't an issue.