608592 - Find a better accesskey for "Close Window" in file menu to stop accidentally closing the browser

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[spodmaster]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b6) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b6) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b6

The 'F' and 'D' keys are adjacent on many keyboard layouts.  Pressing Alt-F then 'D' is therefore quite easy to do with "fat fingers".

It shouldn't be this easy to accidentally quit Firefox, this is a significant usability issue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Press Alt-F
2. Press 'D'

or

1. Open the "File" menu
2. Press 'D'


Actual Results:  
The current Firefox window closes, if this is the only Firefox window then the application terminates.

Expected Results:  
The "File" menu should be displayed / remain visible, Firefox should not close its current Window / quit.

I can't see any rational explanation for why the 'D' key would quit Firefox when the "File" menu is open.  There are no keyboard accelerators bound to the 'D' key from this submenu, in fact none of the menu items have the letter 'D' in at all.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

It's the access key for Close Window (see the little line). Window contains a D ...

Comment 2

[spodmaster]

Thanks for the clarification in comment 1.  Although this is intended behaviour, this is still a usability issue.

Could the accelerator 'D' on Close Window please be removed/deprecated in favour of Ctrl-Shift-W/Alt-F4 ?

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

It's probably not the best solution to have "d" to close the actual window. It's kinda hard to find another free access key in this menu. But something which could be possible is to use "w" and update the access key for work offline to use "k".

Also we would keep in mind that those access keys exist for ages now and people could be confused when we change those.

Alex, what do you think?

Comment 4

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>Also we would keep in mind that those access keys exist for ages now and people
>could be confused when we change those.

yeah, I'm hesitant to remap any of the keys since this breaks muscle memory and causes problems even after users conceptually realize that they key has changed.  We just need to be sure that it is easy for users to quickly get their window back in the event that they do make a mistake.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> yeah, I'm hesitant to remap any of the keys since this breaks muscle memory and
> causes problems even after users conceptually realize that they key has
> changed.  We just need to be sure that it is easy for users to quickly get
> their window back in the event that they do make a mistake.

So what would be the required action to take place on this or another bug? Should this one be closed as wontfix?

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I recommend wontfix, the situation isn't ideal but it's slightly better than Windows Explorer (where alt-f-d will delete the selected file).

One potential solution that doesn't break muscle memory is to introduce a very slight timer so that d only enables after a small amount of time after the user hit alt-f. This way the only way users would hit the two in such a short sequence would be if they actually fat fingered the command.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> One potential solution that doesn't break muscle memory is to introduce a very
> slight timer so that d only enables after a small amount of time after the user
> hit alt-f. This way the only way users would hit the two in such a short
> sequence would be if they actually fat fingered the command.

Not sure if this can be done with access keys. It would even require a global change how we interact with access keys. That's totally out of scope for here.

Marking as wontfix.