I sometimes spend an extraordinary amount of time writing a forum entry or online email -- sometimes 5+ hours -- just to get it to say exactly what I want it to say. And… (read more)
I sometimes spend an extraordinary amount of time writing a forum entry or online email -- sometimes 5+ hours -- just to get it to say exactly what I want it to say. And all too frequently, I accidentally press C-W (the delete-word key on my editor), and my work is instantly gone. I spent several days attempting to solve this problem. Apparently I'm not the only one who has lost data this way. Entries on Reddit pointed me to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/que.../1378404#answer-1510431. I followed the instructions carefully, and double-checked my work, but C-W still kills my current tab. The issue had been archived, but not solved.
I am a programmer (but certainly not in JavaScript), so I try to take technically complex solutions in stride. But after letting things percolate thru my mind for a few days, I realized that I'm not being fair. FireFox is marketed for public consumption. And it's not fair to my sisters, my mother, or other folks who have never programmed anything in their life, to pretend like a solution that might have worked for me (but didn't), would be even a little bit comprehensible to them. I was particularly struck, by something that the moderator said -- not by his words, per se, but by the perspective that his words revealed:
--- Only closing a window (Ctrl+Shift+W) could possibly make Firefox display a warning, closing a tab is always done without a --- warning as you can reopen a closed tab via Ctrl+Shift+T.
Who would know that? I would venture to guess that 99% of FireFox's users don't even know that you can control FireFox from your keyboard -- let alone actually want to do it. People control their browsers with their mouse. They use their keyboards only to type in forum entries and such, or to scroll up/down thru a webpage. I can see where devs might prefer to control/test FireFox from their keyboards, but I'm surprised that they would leave tens of undocumented shortcuts lying about like landmines that everyday users could stumble onto.
So I'm requesting that FireFox disable Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Shift+W (which are the most dangerous shortcuts), by default. Ideally, it would provide an about:config entry so that devs could re-enable those shortcuts if they wish to. By the way, the referenced support entry lists only 1 person with this problem, and only 6 replies. But it lists 2124 views.
Thank you
