803840 - keyboard shortcuts are different on each platform

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20121019030551

Steps to reproduce:

run Firefox on Linux, OS X and Windows


Actual results:

keyboard shortcuts are different on each platform.

There is no portable browser but three different browsers that just happen to be somewhat similar


Expected results:

The keyboard shortcuts should be the same.

While it might be somewhat understandable that due to sacrifices to Apple gods the shortcuts use swapped modifiers on OS X there is no such need for Windows vs Linux, and especially no need to swap some shortcuts and leave others.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

Could you provide examples here?

Comment 2

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

The shortcut to switch to first tab is Alt+1 on Linux and Ctrl+1 on Windows, god knows what on OS X.

Ctrl+I shows page info on Linux but some sidebar on Windows.

Downloads are Ctrl+j on Windows and Ctrl+shift+y on Linux.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is platform convention-related. Mac uses the command key (cloverleaf symbol) in lieu of ctrl for most things. I strongly doubt we will change anything but specific cases where there is no reason not to use the same shortcut.

(In reply to Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek from comment #2)
> The shortcut to switch to first tab is Alt+1 on Linux and Ctrl+1 on Windows,
> god knows what on OS X.

This is a platform convention, AIUI. If chromium, konqueror and other tabbed interfaces on (Gnome) Linux use ctrl, please open a bug to change it there. Mac uses cmd+1, as expected.

> Ctrl+I shows page info on Linux but some sidebar on Windows.

It's the bookmarks sidebar, which is because that's IE's shortcut for it. Mac's equivalent to Linux here (cmd instead of ctrl).

> Downloads are Ctrl+j on Windows and Ctrl+shift+y on Linux.

Ctrl+J is the search field on Linux. Mac's equivalent to Windows (cmd+j instead of ctrl). I don't know why Linux is the odd one out here (probably also platform convention!), but if you think it should be changed, please file a separate bug for the specific issue that you think ought to be changed. This bug as-is shouldn't be fixed, so marking WONTFIX.