506196 - Smart keyboard scrolling on pages with frames

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Daniel Luz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5

When visiting a page composed of frames (and none of them is focused, for example right after the page is loaded), Firefox should redirect scrolling keyboard shortcuts (arrows, page up, page down, home, end, space, shift-space, plus cmd-up/down on Mac, and possibly backspace and shift-backspace depending on browser.backspace_action) to what is most likely the content frame.

This is quite useful, particularly with "toolbar" websites (which probably had a significant rise in widespread use since the Diggbar).

Opera and Safari do this. I don't know their exact algorithms for determining which frame to scroll, but we could start with a very basic approach: if there's only one frame with scrollbars, scroll it. That's enough for pretty much every toolbar, and probably for most menus too.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a website that uses frames.
   Example: http://www.isitfunnytoday.com/view.php?id=8803
2. Try to scroll through the website with the keyboard: press the space bar.

Actual Results:  
Nothing happens.


Expected Results:  
On websites where there's an obvious content frame, scrolling should work fine.


Some other possible algorithms for determining the content frame:

* Look for the largest scrollable frame (as defined by pixels occupied on screen).
* Look for the largest scrollable frame with "*" dimensions.
* Don't try to be too smart; simply refuse to guess when there's more than one scrollable frame.

Comment 1

[daylin.trenton]

Firefox has no key to copy link since 88. It was removed and not replaced. This is completely unreasonable.

A replacement key that is unusable by human hands is not a replacement. It's not unlike telling people they can vote, if they stand in line for 8 hours without water. That is telling people that they can't vote.

Telling people that there is a new key, but it's across the room where NO ONE, NO HUMAN HAND can reach, is telling them that there is no key.

Firefox has NO KEY to copy link currently.

There was no reason to break this, and I want you to know that I am never going to stop reporting it, and I will be identifying the people who broke it, like Asif Youssuff, personally, until it is identified as the bug that it is.

You broke a browser that millions of people depended on for NO REASON. NO REASON. There was NO REASON TO REMOVE THE HOTKEY TO COPY LINKS FROM FIREFOX.