Development:Planning:Focus Chain

Draft of a Focus Chain to fix Bug 152987, Bug 198153, Bug 336949 and Bug 280963

All of these assume a start-point of the location bar, though in most real-world cases we focus the content area (or some part of the Manager) after loading the page/Manager. The chain should pick up from whatever element is focused in those cases, so that auto-focused chains and chains where the user puts focus somewhere behave the same, no matter the starting point.

Web pages

With FKA disabled

• Location bar (start)
• Search field (if not collapsed)
• Content area (actual initial focus)
  • then follow Gecko pref for tabbing/focus within the content area, but don't loop inside the content area
• Location bar (end)

Shift-tab merely reverses the direction of travel.

Issues with content-area tabbing

• Getting from the toolbar to the content area

  smfr mentioned this as a problem; at one point sbwoodside worked around it, which worked but caused Bug 198153

  • That no longer works at all; perhaps sbwoodside's hack broke at some point due to autocomplete/child window cleanup? [bet. 2004-06-01 and 2005-01-21]

• don't loop in Gecko, which is part of the problem in the current bug

  right now, we don't have a way to tell Gecko where the end is so that we can get back out, if a page has form controls (or you Gecko-pref links); this only works when a page has no focusable elements

  • Conrad says we need to do this

• ideally, even when a page has focusable elements, we should initially set focus to the entire page, not the first form element, so that arrow key scroll, etc., work

  doing that might help with the above

With FKA enabled

• Location bar (start)
• Search field (if not collapsed)
• Toolbar buttons to the right of the search field (if any)
• Bookmark Bar first item (if Bookmark Bar is visible)
  • Proceeds through the remainder of the Bookmark Bar items; upon reaching the bottom-rightmost item:
• Tab bar first tab (if Bookmark Bar is visible)
  • Tab proceeds through the active tabs and down-arrow moves the focus into the content area

  'or, since the OS tab behavior is different

  • Arrows go left/right along the tab bar (activating each tab as you reach it) and tab takes you into the content area

    I think we should do this; it's "cleaner" and how the OS works (and Firefox, but not Safari)

• Content area (actual initial focus)
  • follow Gecko pref for tabbing/focus within the content area, but don't loop inside the content area
• Leftmost toolbar button
• Location bar (end)

Shift-tab merely reverses the direction of travel.

Issues with tab bar transversal

• Where does the tab close button fit in the chain? (with either method of transversal)
• If arrows cycle between tabs (like in the OS), we have OS consistency but the tab bar and the other toolbars behave differently from each other
  • this is logical because 2 are toolbars and one is tabs, but will users realise that?
• If tab moves between tabs and down-arrow brings focus into the content area, shift-tab will still get you back from the content area to the tab bar, but breaks the parallelism
  • I.e., normally tab goes one direction and shift-tab reverses; here down-arrow goes the one direction but shift-tab reverses

Issues with content-area tabbing

• See list above

Manager views

With FKA disabled

• Location bar (start)
• Search field (if not collapsed)
• into the Manager
  • Manager search field (actual initial focus)
  • Manager right (outliner) pane
  • Manager left (Collectons) pane
• Location bar (end)

Shift-tab merely reverses the direction of travel.

With FKA enabled

• Location bar (start)
• Search field (if not collapsed)
• Toolbar buttons to the right of the search field (if any)
• Bookmark Bar first item (if Bookmark Bar is visible)
  • Proceeds through the remainder of the Bookmark Bar items; upon reaching the bottom-rightmost item:
• Tab bar first tab (if Bookmark Bar is visible)
  • See above for order
• into the Manager
  • Manager search field (actual initial focus)
  • Manager right (outliner) pane
  • Manager left (Collectons) pane
  • New Collection menubutton
  • New separator/folder/etc. menubutton
  • Action menubutton
  • Sort menubutton
• Leftmost toolbar button
• Location bar (end)

Shift-tab merely reverses the direction of travel.

Issues

• How do you access the menu in the search field (to select the filter type)?
• How do you access the column headings to change sort order or which field to sort upon?
  • Or to resize them

  Some things just aren't (can't be) accessible here, just like you can't customize a Cocoa toolbar with a keyboard....

Assorted thoughts

i.e., why we're doing Manager focus this way