743323 - "Alt" key for skipping switch-to-tab for the selected autocomplete result is not discoverable

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[ill]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120310010316

Steps to reproduce:

When typing in a certain url into firefox and then using the autocomplete feature by hitting down arrow, selecting it, and then hitting enter, instead of it opening on the blank tab that I was on, it just changed to a different tab that already had that url in it.


Actual results:

The page did not open


Expected results:

The page should have opened.

Comment 1

[Thomas Ahlblom]

That sounds intentional. Didn't the menu entry you selected say "Switch to tab"?

Comment 2

[ill]

Yes. Is there a way to fix this bug then?

Comment 3

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Probably it isn't a bug.

Autocomplete works differently though in Firefox 14 (currently Nightly), so maybe you will like that behavior better. In Firefox 14 you can still select an existing tab with the down arrow, but to quickly open the page autocomplete suggest you just hit enter.
http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Comment 4

[[:Aleksej]]

There are multiple bugs on this, with different requested goals.

As bug 530209 comment 24 says, holding Alt while any entry is selected hides/disables "Switch to tab" on all the entries for the time.  That seems to solve the problem described here, even if is not discoverable.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

per comment 4

Comment 7

[ill]

So it not being discoverable is still a bug...

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)
> per comment 4

I think I misunderstood comment 4. 

Aleksej, do you recall which bug# implements switching to the matching autocompleted URL?

Comment 10

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

I don't think that every The alt key behavior is documented on various pages that list keyboard shortcuts, including here: 
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search 
and here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly?redirectlocale=en-US&as=u&redirectslug=Keyboard+shortcut

I have also submitted a change to this page: 
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-bookmarks-history-and-tabs 

to help this feature be more easily discoverable from documentation. It seems very useful. However, I don't think it's possible to make every keyboard shortcut discoverable from the UI. "Open in new tab" is described in our main support page about keyboard shortcuts. 

Ill, if you'd like to improve that documentation, I think you should do that without needing to file a bug.

Comment 11

[ill]

This isn't about documentation, this is about there being nothing shown to the user that they can bypass this, and with no way to get rid of it in the preferences, the user will have no idea how to make it stop happening. There should be something shown on the bar.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It clearly is not discoverable. So if this were to be closed, I think it would be WONTFIX, not INVALID.  

I don't find any duplicate reports of discoverability - related bug reports https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?v4=switch%20to%20tab&o5=substring&f1=short_desc&o3=substring&list_id=9930230&v3=switch-to-tab&o1=nowordssubstr&j2=OR&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Components&f4=short_desc&chfieldto=Now&v5=switch-to-tab&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=3y&f3=short_desc&f2=OP&o4=substring&f5=status_whiteboard&product=Core&product=Firefox - so I don't think it is a big problem for users. OTOH, I don't think we should close this unless there are good reasons they didn't make it discoverable.

Comment 14

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.