633812 - Firefox Help About window should close with keyboard shortcut control-w

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[B.J. Herbison]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110212 Firefox/4.0b12pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110212 Firefox/4.0b12pre

The Help About window should close in response to a control-W from the keyboard. This is more significant with Firefox 4 as the nice big "Close" button has been removed in the redesign.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Help/About...
2.Control-W
Actual Results:  
About Firefox window stays open.

Expected Results:  
About Firefox window closes.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

That's because it's a dialog box, not a window. In which the close button should not have been moved IMHO (bug 608934).

It's also floating on top of the other windows, which it shouldn't either (bug 611955). When it doesn't do that anymore and it becomes a normal window, it really needs the ctrl-w shortcut.

Comment 2

[B.J. Herbison]

I appreciate your response, thank you for explaining some of the related issues.

I don't appreciate the difference between dialog boxes and windows -- the About thing looks like a window to me. Various small things appear on my screen (both from Firefox and from other programs) and it just seems inconsistent that standard keyboard shortcuts work with some of them and not others.

Is there a good basis for the inconsistency? Has there been some user-interface study that shows a benefit to users of certain types of windows not responding to control-W?

Comment 3

[[not reading bugmail]]

your inconsistency is driven by the OS and application development standards.

Comment 4

[George Carstoiu]

I do think that B.J. has a point and that the normal user will consider this as being inconsistent behavior.

Comment 5

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

There is definitely a bug here.

The may be a case for control-W having no effect in dialog windows, because a dialog window requests a response from the user.  By definition, a "dialog" must be a two-way conversation.

If the about window is a "dialog", then there needs to be a way for the user to respond, such as an "OK" (or close) button.  (Bug 608934.)

Probably, we should just accept that the about window is not a dialog and make it a normal window, and it makes sense that normal window shortcuts should also work here.

If the about window should still be presented as transient for some parent/owner window (which seems to be approximately what people meant by "always-on-top"), then the GTK port of widget code will need to be extended to properly support normal toplevel windows with parents.

Comment 8

[harald.dunkel]

I would like to suggest to increase the priority of this report. AFAICS the help->about window cannot be closed at all, unless firefox interacts with an external program (e.g. the XWindow manager). This might make it unsuitable for a kiosk environment.

Comment 11

[Bardot Jérôme]

This bug is also present on thunderbird.
And with a windows manager like i3 for close it the fastest way to close it is a killall firefox/thunderbird. 
Is the part of code managing it is share between FF TH ?

Comment 12

[chris.snell]

Can we get some traction on this bug?  It's 7 years old and still very real: there's no way to close the "About" window on Firefox (Linux) without using the window manager to actually "kill" the window.  Super annoying.  

All of the dependencies appear to have been resolved.  Can this get fixed soon? 

Thanks!

Comment 13

[:aceman]

(In reply to chris.snell from comment #12)
> Can we get some traction on this bug?  It's 7 years old and still very real:
> there's no way to close the "About" window on Firefox (Linux) without using
> the window manager to actually "kill" the window.  Super annoying.  

What do you mean here? You can press Esc to close the dialog or the close button on the title bar. Or you have no title bar in the window manager?

Comment 14

[chris.snell]

It is true that you can close the dialog with Esc but there's no visual indication that this can be done.  I don't know of any other app that uses Esc as a hotkey to close a window.

Comment 15

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 4 duplicates.
:mossop, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 16

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.