Key bindings in Firefox; edit vs. sidebars!

[Neil Woolford]

A couple of levels down under the Firefox view menu you can turn
sidebars for history and bookmarks on and off.  This a touch buried for
such a useful feature, so there are hot-keys for the job, Ctrl+H and
Ctrl+B respectively.

When I first tried to use these hot-keys, they appeared not to function.

Closer inspection of the problem reveals a clash of key-bindings;  when
the text cursor is active in an entry box Ctrl+B gives a non-destructive
backspace and Ctrl+H a destructive (erasing) one.  These are (I think)
common editor bindings for these keys.  If the text cursor is not
active, then the sidebars do appear in response to the hot-keys.

IMHO this is not actually very helpful behaviour;  the interface is
subtly modal in a way that many users will find difficult to handle.
Most of us work at keyboards with backspace and cursor keys so don't
*need* the Ctrl+B/H bindings to edit text.

My question is how can I enforce the binding to the sidebars (given in
the Firefox menu) even when the text editing cursor is live?

Neil