Key bindings in Firefox; edit vs. sidebars!

[Neil Woolford]

At 14:11 02/12/04, you wrote:

>I really like Safari's (infinitely, IMNSHO) and Mac Internet
>Explorer's History pull-down menu. Others (like you ;) love Netscape's
>default solution (slow as molasses in January mind you).

I don't know about that at all...  I've been a happy Opera user for several 
years now ;)
In fact I've installed Opera on my copy of Ubuntu for my use;  Firefox is 
only there to
allow me to support the default installation for my brother, who is taking 
his first steps
in modern computing with Ubuntu.  I'm beginning to wish I'd given him 
Opera.  (Come
to that he finds Evolution hard to drive as well, and I don't blame 
him.  It is a clone of
something I didn't like when I first met the original.  I use Eudora under 
Windows, and
find it generally a pleasure.)

>IIRC they are vestiges from the old terminal days when "special"
>characters were sent as control escape sequences. [snip]
>
>It's a tad strange that they'd be active in a modern GUI, especially
>when the ctrl key is universally used to issue commands to
>applications (and, since ALL keyboards have backspace, arrow keys,
>page-up/down/end/home keys this is redundant... even the smallest
>laptops have these keys (sometime buried under Fn)).

I couldn't agree more.


>Having different modalities (?) in a text editing box is a *bad*,
>*bad* idea. This is a problem that ought to be addressed upstream, if
>it's indeed true.

It could be time to file my first bug report.  Certainly I find it a 
fiddle, and my brother,
as a new user, would find it maddening and very hard to understand at 
all.  I think he'd
be right too.  Unsignalled changes of mode are one of the worst things you 
can put
in an interface.  The whole thing becomes 'mystery meat' very fast...


>The other thing that I would also really like to see is to have the
>whole URL selected when you click on the address bar. Rarely do I have
>to edit part of an URL (& I suspect that I'm not that much different
>from the "typical" user) so it makes more sense to accomodate what
>happens most of the time.

Yes.  That is the behaviour of everything else I can think of, usually with 
a touch of
any non-destructive navigation key returning you to being ready to edit 
within the url.



> > 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?
>
>Something that ought to happen upstream IMNSHO.

Back to that bug report then.  Ubuntu or Mozilla?

Neil

PS  Are there any mailing lists that concentrate on useability and 
interface matters?  Or
good sites about them, come to that. 
-------------- next part --------------

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.799 / Virus Database: 543 - Release Date: 19/11/04