Note:
This is also an accessibility issue as those of us with limited or impaired motor control can be inordinately affected in a way that limits our use of Firefox or ma… (read more)
Note:
This is also an accessibility issue as those of us with limited or impaired motor control can be inordinately affected in a way that limits our use of Firefox or makes it virtually impossible to use in any use-case more complex than browsing YouTube.
Issue:
There are certain, pre-defined, keyboard shortcuts within Firefox whose action is both immediate and irrevocable. Those of us who have limited, or impaired, motor control are particularly susceptible to this, though I have heard anecdotal evidence that other - unimpaired - users suffer from this as well.
Example:
There is a particular key combination that I periodically, (accidentally), hit while typing that immediately and irrevocably clears the dialog that I am entering text into - as I am doing here - with no possibility of recovery and no warning that a potentially disastrous action is about to take place.
My specific case, (that is, the most recent instance of my specific case), occurred last night while composing a reply to a topic within the Microsoft Flight Simulator forum addressing a particular, and popular, issue with the sim.
I spent a significant amount of time creating this message - setting paragraph formatting, creating tables, inserting images, carefully crafting the text and such like, that had taken me upwards of an hour to prepare.
While typing - I managed to inadvertently hit a magical "Nuke-and-Destroy" key combination that caused all my lengthy, careful, painstakingly crafted work to immediately vanish with no chance of recovery.
To this very day I still have no idea what combination of keys does this - and if I knew, I would try to suppress it at the keyboard/system level so that Firefox never sees it.
When I searched for a solution to this problem, I found the following article on this site:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/que.../1364260]
In essence, (though it was worded much more politely), the answer was that Mozilla knows about the issue of potentially undesirable "magic" key combinations, has no plans to address it, and if you don't like it it just vacuums being you.
Though this particular key combination might be useful in certain cases, (though I cannot imagine what use-case would benefit from accidentally destroying hours of work), the utterly irrevocable nature of the action - and the absolute lack of any warning whatsoever - makes this a classic case in the annals of horrid user interface design; to the point of being a functional bug even though it works as designed.
A more desirable action would be to:
- Allow it to be disabled entirely, along with the other potentially annoying/disastrous keyboard shortcuts.
- Provide a (default) action that warns the user that this action is both immediate and irrevocable and allowing the (default) option to abort the action. Extra credit: Allow the user to permanently disable the offending feature from the dialog.
- In the unlikely event that a particular user might wish to use this regularly and deliberately, allow the user to bypass the warnings and permanently enable the feature - with the caveat that it vacuums being them if they do something wrong - not unlike the disclaimer when accessing about:config.
I would suggest that this action, and the action of other "magic" keys/key-combinations within Firefox represents a significant burden to those of us who may already be struggling to use a keyboard. Perpetuating this class of issue, especially since it's a known issue and there's no desire whatsoever to accommodate those of us negatively affected by it, borders on both arrogance and ableism.
I would like to humbly place this request at the feet of whomever is responsible for this atrocious policy and earnestly request they reverse this unpleasant and destructive behavior.
Respectfully submitted:
Jim Harris.
Added image:
[a blank page representing the results of the magic "Nuke-and-Destory" key combination. :wink:]
