91592 - Inconsistent keydown repeat behavior across platforms

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 597981

(Core :: Widget: Win32, defect)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

nsMenuBarListener gets a KeyDown event along with each KeyPress event generated 
from autorepeat.  As a result, if Alt is held down for a long time, the 
listener thinks it's being pressed repeatedly, which results in the menu bar 
getting focus in several cases when it shouldn't.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Apply my third patch in bug 79898.
2. Press Alt to focus the menu bar.
3. Press Alt to remove focus from the menu bar, but hold it for a few seconds 
before releasing it.

or
1. Apply my third patch in bug 79898.
2. Alt+click on an empty area of the content area.
3. Continue holding Alt for another few seconds.

Result: menu bar gets focus.

This prevents us from using Alt+click for anything on Win32.  (Alt+click would 
probably be used for something unimportant, or as a synonym for 
Ctrl+Shift+click, because Alt+click is reserved on some Linux systems for 
moving windows around.)

Comment 1

[joki (gone)]

Yeah, this is irritating.  Looking at for 1.0

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: testcase: happens in web content, too

Comment 4

[Pham]

.

Comment 5

[Vedran Miletic]

retargeting

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

In OnKeyDown I changed
  BOOL result = DispatchKeyEvent(NS_KEY_DOWN, 0, virtualKeyCode, aKeyData);
to
  BOOL result = (aKeyData & (1 << 30)) ||
                DispatchKeyEvent(NS_KEY_DOWN, 0, virtualKeyCode, aKeyData);
Does anyone know if there's an existing constant for that 1 << 30?
Also, is || a good idea or should I be using !(aKeyData & (1 << 30)) &&?

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

Neil, I think we should leave this as is and fire keydown for all repeated
keypresses. This will make us in-line with IE.

We can't generally use onkeypress in HTML apps, because IE doesn't fire it for
any non-printable keys. So, if you want to create an accessible DHTML menubar
you need to use onkeydown. If we fix this then autorepeat will work in the DHTML
menubar in IE, but not in Mozilla.

I think this bug should be to make keydown autorepeat for all Mozilla platforms.

Comment 8

[Aaron Leventhal]

Here's what IE does:
To start with, the only keys that get keypress in IE are printable keys.
So right developers need to use onkeydown if they want the convenience of
declarative syntax instead of using addEventListener.

IE repeats onkeydown. For onkeypress. it also repeats if it is getting fired
(again, it onkeypress is only fired for printable keys).

Here's what Mozilla does:
We fire onkeypress for all keys, not just printable keys.
We repeat both onkeydown and onkeypress on Windows, but not on all platforms. On
some platforms we only repeat onkeypress. I haven't gone through and
test/analyzed code to see where we differ and where we don't.

For quirks mode we should do what IE does, but we should be the same on all
platforms.

Bug 167145 is related -- make preventDefault for an onkeydown also
preventDefault for the onkeypress -- that's another IE compatibility item.

If we fix all of these to be the same as IE in quirks mode, we'll make writing
keyboard usable DHTML widgets a lot easier.

More notes on IE/Mozilla differences and how one has to make keyboard usable
DHTML widgets is here:
http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/tabindex

Comment 9

[Aaron Leventhal]

Still an important bug.

Comment 10

[Axel Kittenberger]

Developing a webpage this bug really bugs me :-)

However is there a reliable way to test in javascript, that repeat is broken? Since then I can just hand-simulate repeats with timers, until receiving the keyupevent. 

However if one simulates repeats, while really getting repeats from the browser also breaks things up!

Comment 11

[Kirill Maximov]

I suppose https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526779 duplicates this one.

Comment 12

[Kirill Maximov]

In my app (http://checkvist.com) I use keydown event to handle all the keyboard.
I have keyboard navigation on the list (with arrows Up/Down).

On Windows, multiple 'keydown' events are generated, and I can go up/down in the list.
But on Mac/Linux, only one keydown event is generated (Firefox 3.6.3). So, to go up/down I have to press up/down keys multiple times. _Very_ annoying.

Unfortunately, I cannot use keypress event for this (because of multiple problems with FF and other browsers).

Comment 14

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I believe this is fixed as of bug 597981 and bug 597987 being fixed, right?

Comment 15

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

Well, must be bug 597981. See also https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent#Auto-repeat_handling