[Bug 181575] pressing Enter in URL bar selects mouse hover target in substring-search pop-down

[Colin Watson]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

The new substring-search pop-down box attached to the URL bar in
Firefox-3.0 is generally very nice, but I have one annoyance with it
regarding keyboard navigation. I tend not to use the mouse a great deal,
and am in the habit of pressing Ctrl-t Ctrl-l <type URL> to open a new
tab, unless I'm copying and pasting the URL.

Here's a reduced test case. Open a new tab in Firefox-3.0 (current
version in Hardy: 3.0~b3~cvs20080101t1000+nobinonly-0ubuntu1). Ensure
that the mouse is positioned a little below the URL bar, in the area
that will be covered by the substring-search pop-down box. Type a single
character, so that the substring-search pop-down box appears. Note that
whatever the mouse happens to be hovering over is selected. Press Enter.
The hovered-over entry is selected.

As described, I suppose this is not so annoying, but the way I encounter
this in practice is that I try to enter "http://www.example.com/", but
because my mouse is hovering over the position in the pop-down box where
"http://www.example.com/something/else" is placed, pressing Enter
selects that instead, when what I actually wanted (and what I contend is
expected behaviour) was to get to the URL I typed in.

IMHO, pressing Enter should only select an entry from substring-search
if you navigated to that entry using the cursor keys. Otherwise, it
should require a mouse click to select it. The current way that mouse
positioning and keyboard navigation interact is confusing.

** Affects: firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Confirmed

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pressing Enter in URL bar selects mouse hover target in substring-search pop-down
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/181575
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