670457 - [META] Mac: text areas and text fields: contextual menu: add Substitutions, Transformations, and Services items

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, task, P2)

Description

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

Attachment: Screen photo of Safari, which has the Transformations and the Services.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build ID: 20110615151330

Steps to reproduce:

On Mac OS X 10.6.8 (10K540). Firefox 5.
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit .
Type "Hello" in the content text area, select the word "Hello" and right-click it.



Actual results:

I don't have the Transformations nor the Services. See screen photo of Safari, which has them.



Expected results:

I have the Transformations and the Services. Safari has them. See screen photo of Safari, which has the Transformations and the Services.

Comment 1

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

The Transformations and the Services are OS-wide.

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

This probably ought to live in Core, since presumably it's a Widget:Cocoa issue (like Dictionary support and the like are). I'll let Markus, Josh, etc. decide whether this is something they want.

Comment 4

[200found]

This bug has affected me for the last two versions, specifically, the lack of the system-wide dictionary.

Expected behavior:

1. highlight any word in the Finder.
2. right-click to bring up context menu.
3. select "look up <word you selected>" menu item
4. a brief and very useful dictionary definition quickly pops up.

Actual behavior:

1. highlight any word in Firefox.
2. right-click to bring up context menu.
3. "look up <word>" menu item does not exist.

Unfortunate workaround:

1. copy word with ctrl+c
2. new tab with ctrl+t
3. type in address bar "define " and ctrl+v to paste word
4. get new word definition
5. close window with ctrl+w
6. fume about how long this has been broken


version info Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to 200found from comment #4)
> This bug has affected me for the last two versions, specifically, the lack
> of the system-wide dictionary.

That, specifically, is bug 301451.

Comment 6

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

Greg, I have put back Services, not Substitutions. I don't know exactly what the Substitutions are (I don't have my Mac at hand), but they are not the Services. If you know what Substitutions are and if you want to add them too, feel free to do so. But please don't replace the Services with the Substitutions. Among the Services can be home-made Services, and they are very useful, I use them a lot in my other browsers.

Comment 7

[Greg K.]

Nicolas, please have a look at Bug 135268 (which blocks Bug 104331) for Services support.

Substitutions are another Core Text feature; they usually appear just above Transformations in the contextual menu.

If you can determine the terminology which encompasses both Transformations and Substitutions to use in the Summary field, that would be helpful.

Comment 8

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

Greg, regarding the Services, I have had a look at request bug 135268, and it has been marked as "FIXED" *in 2008*. But, in the present request bug 670457, I encountered and reported the lack of Services in Firefox 5 *in 2011*. So :
 1) Either the request marked as "FIXED" is not done.
 2) Or the two requests do not deal with the same scope.

Comment 9

[Greg K.]

Hint: it would be interesting and useful to determine the answer to that question.

Comment 10

[Greg K.]

I see the problem, and I misunderstood the situation. Bug 135268 was about the Services item under the Firefox application menu, which is still there. You're right, here; text controls don't offer Services (or Substitutions, or Transformations) on their contextual menu. I'll confirm the bug on that basis (and just add Transformations to the summary).

Now, it would be interesting to know what needs to be done to hook these up.

Comment 11

[u485023]

Can we please enable a right-click services menu on OSX? This is standard (e.g. Safari, TextEdit, ... all have it) and it should be there in Firefox on OSX as well). Maybe it was just forgotton?

Can any dev look into this?

Comment 12

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

Services and Transformation are possible to handle currently. I haven't looked in much detail, but the implementation doesn't seem that difficult to replicate.

However, Font, Spelling and Grammar, and Substitutions can not be done yet, since we handle services in plain-text only, therefore we lose any formatting.

It's possible I'll be able to get to this soon.

Comment 13

[u485023]

Josiah: where you able to look into details? I'm still missing a right-click > Services option for Firefox in stable and latest FirefoxDeveloper edition. Chromium, WebKit all have that menu.

Comment 14

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

I was not, sadly. And I don't think I'll have time to look at this considering my other responsibilities.

Comment 15

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

This request is for text fields (input type="text") too.

Comment 16

[Metro Wind]

I'm also bothered by this issue.  In fact this has become the only reason I don't use Firefox as my main browser.  This problem would be (and should be) resolved by using native NSTextField for, you know, text fields.

Also I'm not sure why those awesome (relative to safari, in terms of web technologies support) web browsers *have to* have at least one quirk that prevents people from using them.  Firefox has this, and Chrome cannot properly map CSS colors.  It's almost like they get paid by Apple so that people would be forced to use Safari.

Comment 17

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

Morphing this into a tracking bug.  We want to get this area up to parity with Safari. See coming bugs that split out the work required for each sub menu item requested here

Comment 18

[steve]

Tracking bugs added summer 2016. 2017 is approaching quickly. Are there plans to address this?

Comment 19

[echosa]

Is there any ETA on adding the missing macOS features to Firefox? Not being able to use the typically system-wide text substitutions in macOS (defined and edited in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text) is quite a deterrent. 

Also, if this is to act as a meta conglomerate ticket for macOS bugs and parity, does this ticket about ctrl-t behavior belong also? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433972

The lack of substitutions and incorrect ctrl-t behavior are the largest annoyances and deterrents to Firefox on macOS, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'd really love to see these squashed in upcoming releases. I'm sure there are bigger fish to fry, but maybe, just maybe, these are quick, easy fixes that can be snuck into near future releases. That would be amazing if so.

Comment 20

[Metro Wind]

(In reply to echosa from comment #19)
> Is there any ETA on adding the missing macOS features to Firefox? Not being
> able to use the typically system-wide text substitutions in macOS (defined
> and edited in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text) is quite a deterrent. 

I agree. This is *the* thing that forces me to not use Firefox on a Mac. I had to write an extension for basic things like curly quotation and em-dashes for cases where I want to use Firefox. But it’ll never be as good as the OS level thing, and there’s also `contenteditable` that is extremely hard to deal with…