648504 - Alt-key access to pull-down Menu Bar menus does not work in full-screen mode

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Andrew B]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110322 Firefox/4.0b13pre Firefox/4.0b13pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110322 Firefox/4.0b13pre Firefox/4.0b13pre

When running FF4 in full-screen mode ( using F11 ), the Alt-key access to the Menu Bar menus does not work.

e.g. when in standard display mode, Alt-F opens the File menu.  When in full-screen mode the keystroke does nothing but remove focus from the window, requiring a mouse-click or ESCAPE before any further actions can be performed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Put browser into full-screen mode
2. Press Alt+F to access File menu
Actual Results:  
No menu appears and focus is lost.

Expected Results:  
Menu will appear as summoned.

Comment 1

[George Carstoiu]

Feel free to reopen if you consider that I am wrong.

Comment 2

[Andrew B]

Hi George,

I did see 575755 during research but it is specifically about mouse navigation on MacOS, whereas this one is about keyboard access.

I'll re-open this one as I now have some more info to add.

Comment 3

[Andrew B]

Additional info:

When using the Alt-key combo in full-screen, the menu is actually being activated from the keyboard but remains invisible.

For example, when selecting the Bookmarks menu using Alt+B, I can use the down-arrow key to move through the invisible menu and pressing Enter selects a Bookmark.  Similarly with the other menu options on the Menu Bar.

So the menu is actually being activated, just not displayed.  Odd.

Comment 4

[George Carstoiu]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:5.0a2) Gecko/20110417 Firefox/5.0a2

Marking issue as New.

Issue present ever since Firefox 3.6.16

Comment 5

[u279076]

Adding tracking? for Firefox 5 and 6 as this could be a serious problem for accessibility reasons.

Comment 6

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

Tracking flags are to follow issues intrinsically related to a specific release - this is a bug that we should fix, ideally sooner rather than later, but it's not specifically tied to Firefox 5 (or 6).

Comment 7

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Pressing alt or f10 to activate the menu bar also works in full screen mode, even though the menu bar is invisible. For example:
1. Activate full screen mode.
2. Press f10.
3. Press f.
4. Press o.
Result: The Open File dialog appears.

I would expect one of the following:
1. The menu bar and menus become visible when activated via the keyboard; or
2. Alt, f10 and menu accelerators (alt+f, etc.) should have no effect at all in full screen mode.

This caused a screen reader user to initially believe that pressing f11 did not work to exit full screen mode. See http://www.nvda-project.org/ticket/1619

Comment 8

[Dan Jacobson]

Yeah, I always wondered why they denied my ALT- keystrokes just because I was in full screen mode.
I started to think "well you can't see them, so it would be dangerous for us to guess which ones you meant'.

Comment 9

[Benno Schulenberg]

This bug is a duplicate of bug #428981.

Comment 10

[machinegodzilla]

+1 Firefox 20

Comment 12

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Gijs, would it be feasible to simply disable the alt key opening the menus if FF is in full-screen mode? The menus aren't intended to be opened when in full-screen mode, so not opening them and thus not throwing users into an undefined state sounds like the best solution to me for this one.

Comment 13

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #12)
> Gijs, would it be feasible to simply disable the alt key opening the menus
> if FF is in full-screen mode? The menus aren't intended to be opened when in
> full-screen mode, so not opening them and thus not throwing users into an
> undefined state sounds like the best solution to me for this one.

I would tend to agree. This bug also affects Windows, from a quick test. I'm not sure what the best fix would be, but I suspect just adding a focus handler on the menubar that focuses the URL bar instead, if in fullscreen, might do the trick?

Sticking this in the backlog and twiddling some other fields.

Comment 14

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Definitely affects Windows; see comment 7. No idea why I didn't change the platform back then. :)

Comment 15

[Fabian]

Disabling the menus seems like throwing the baby with the bathwater to me.
Users might want to have minimal chrome and browse normally in full screen mode, including having access to the menus. This use case works somewhat in IE11, and fine in Opera (both Presto and Blink-based).
Especially as we continue to offer the traditional menu as the full and keyboard accessible alternative, we should strive keep it working.

Disabling the menu might circumvent part of the problem (the confusion), the other part will then persist (inaccessible commands, unusable fullscreen mode for keyboard users).

Comment 16

[Kalle Olavi Niemitalo]

The menus are invisible in full-screen mode but I memorized a few key sequences and liked being able to enable and disable style sheets that way. In Debian firefox-esr 45.3.0esr-1~deb8u1, the menus do not work in full-screen mode at all; the aforementioned baby has been thrown. Bug 1192655 attachment 8653231 [details] [diff] [review] changed nsMenuBarListener::HandleEvent to prevent opening the menus in this case. I built a local package with that patch reverted and now I can again use the menus, although they are still invisible.

Someone in the #mozilla IRC channel suggested instead using the Stylish extension to add a CSS rule that forces the menu bar to remain visible whenever the tool bars are visible. Then, no C++ changes would be needed. I have not tried that.

Comment 17

[Peter Lyons Kehl]

Related to/duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428981

Comment 18

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Changing qe-verify? to qe-verify+.