866582 - allow menus to stay open if modifier keys are used or actions are taken through the context menu

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:22.0) Gecko/20130412 Firefox/22.0 Iceweasel/22.0a2
Build ID: 20130412004014

Steps to reproduce:

Wanted to click more than one item in a menu


Actual results:

the menu assumes I only want to click one item so closes,
forcing me to dig it all up again


Expected results:

There should be a setting to make menus not assume we are through with them on their own.

Comment 1

[Dan Jacobson]

Try e.g., View -> Sidebar -> ...
or View -> Toolbar -> ...
or any of the thousand other menus.

Comment 2

[Dan Jacobson]

Not even CTRL+Click is enough to tell Firefox that I also would like to make another choice while I am here!

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Seems like it was designed as not desirable to allow for this scenario.
Is there a developer/UX person who can say this is wontfix/aka won't accept a patch for this request?

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #3)
> Seems like it was designed as not desirable to allow for this scenario.
> Is there a developer/UX person who can say this is wontfix/aka won't accept
> a patch for this request?

Also, I did an extensive search (rough cut http://mzl.la/1Y4rjrJ) and didn't find any open, invalid or wontfix bugs of similar description.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #3)
> Seems like it was designed as not desirable to allow for this scenario.
> Is there a developer/UX person who can say this is wontfix/aka won't accept
> a patch for this request?

wontfix?

Comment 6

[Dan Jacobson]

OK, except for cases like "I would like to open bookmark A in a new tab, and bookmark B also in a new tab, and minimize the clicking needed to do that", I suppose in the vast majority of cases the user wishes the menu would close upon picking an item, an it wouldn't be worth it to add SHIFT, CTRL, etc...

Comment 7

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

If the user is using a modifier key that would cause something to happen in the background we could keep the menu open. One example where this is already supported is to right click on items in the overflow menu and choose "Remove from Toolbar" from the context menu. We don't close the overflow menu when those context menu items are clicked, which allows the user to move multiple items without having to reopen the overflow menu.