81377 - "First TAB" and/or "ESC" to get focus on & Select the URL-bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 28583

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Lairo]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9) Gecko/20010505

Hit ESC to get focus and highlight URL bar.

This needs to be implemented to allow quick access to the URL bar

Comment 1

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

um, do you mean inside a document (use ctrl-l) or pressing esc in the urlbar?
esc in urlbar was implemented by me. 

and none of these occur in ns4 on windows.

Comment 2

[Peter Lairo]

Yes, hitting ESC while in the document should place focus in the URLbar and
select the URL.

PS. CTRL+L is not enough for the average user (not intuitive). Your ESC to
highlight, *while* already in the URL is a nice step in the right direction, but
if a normal user has to use the mouse to get there, he might as well do a
double-click.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Not 4xp.  I just tested this on Mac and Linux.  Doron tested it on Windows.  On 
none does 4.x focus the URL bar on ESC.

In fact ESC already has a function.  It stops page loading.  If the page is 
loaded it stops animations.

assigning to mpt and suggesting this be invalid due to the years of muscle memory 
this would completely throw away.

Peter, you've been filing bugs for a while now.  Please don't file them on 
browser-general when they have an obvious component they belong to (like this 
one).

Comment 4

[Peter Lairo]

Well, basically I'm saying that what we really need is a simple and intuitive
way to select and highlight the URLbar. ESC (or Tab) seems to be the best solution.

Maybe, it can stop page loading while the page is loading, and select &
highlight the URLbar once the page is loaded.

In any event, if it comes down to deciding between the two, we should use ESC to
select & highlight the URLbar, because this will make IE defectors feel more at
home ;)- oops, just realized that IE selects & highlights the URLbar on the
FIRST TAB click and not ESC. Maybe this bug should be wontfix. In any event I'll
file another bug for select & highlight the URLbar on FIRST Tab click, and you
experts can decide which to implement (or maybe even both) - sorry.

Comment 5

[Peter Lairo]

changing summary to reflect new broader scope of this bug (tab AND esc to
focus/select URLbar) as per [e-mail] in bug 81404.

Comment 6

[Peter Lairo]

Changing summary from "or" to "and/or" - sorry for the spam.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

First tab sounds like a good idea to me.

Comment 8

[Jesse Ruderman]

Making tab select the contents of text fields (including the location bar) while
focusing them is bug 28583.  Making the first tab go to the location bar is bug
31809, which has been fixed.  

I don't like the first tab going to the location bar, because it forces the user
to remember whether anything has happened that would cause pressing tab to have
a different behavior and discourages users from getting to be able to use Ctrl+L
quickly.

Marking as a dup of 28583 because 31809 is already fixed and because changing
the behavior of Esc to focus the location bar looks like a wontfix.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28583 ***