1321810 - (E10s) Pressing Left/Right/Up/Down arrows has different functionality when E10s is enabled/disabled

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, defect, P5)

Description

[Justin [:JW_SoftvisionQA]]

STR:
1. Navigate to https://people.mozilla.org/~mnoorenberghe/w3c_notifications.htm
2. Click the Direction datalist
3. Navigate through the list by pressing the left/right/up/down arrows.

Actual:
E10s=True:
Pressing Left/Right arrows does nothing.

E10s=False:
Pressing Left/Right arrows navigates Up/down through the list. 

Affected OSes Windows and Ubuntu

Comment 1

[Neil Deakin]

This should only happen on Windows.

Comment 2

[Justin [:JW_SoftvisionQA]]

This also happens on Ubuntu 16.04. I just verified

Comment 3

[Neil Deakin]

But it shouldn't happen on Ubuntu. GTK dropdowns don't do this, so we shouldn't either.

Comment 4

[David Durst [:ddurst]]

I don't understand #c3: Are you saying that it navigating through using arrows shouldn't work on Ubuntu regardless of e10s?

Either way, the behavior on Ubuntu sounds inconsistent between e10s and non-e10s.

Comment 5

[Neil Deakin]

It shouldn't work on Ubuntu in either case, but with bug 1300784 we aren't concerned with non-e10s in Firefox.

Comment 6

[David Durst [:ddurst]]

OK. So if I understand this correctly, this bug has two parts:
1) the behavior is wrong on Windows: pressing Left/Right arrows navigates Up/down through the list should be consistently true on both e10s and non-e10s;
2) the behavior is wrong on Ubuntu: pressing Left/Right arrows navigates Up/down through the list should be consistently false on both e10s and non-e10s.

Comment 7

[Neil Deakin]

That's correct. This is a very low priority issue though.

Comment 8

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Neil: do you have an opinion on what should happen when we use a vertical writing mode for the <select> popup (see bug 1170129)? My instinct is that the arrow keys should respect whatever the visuals look like, but maybe that's not what users expect...

The old <select> popup always interprets "right" to mean "next item" (and similar for "left"), but that doesn't seem right for vertical-rl writing modes.

Comment 9

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Whoops, forgot to ni? you; see comment 8.

Comment 10

[Neil Deakin]

As far as I know, there is no 'vertical mode' dropdown/combobox type widget anywhere in any existing UI system so I don't think there's any precedence to follow, nor would users have any expectation as to what would happen. I would think that users would expect select elements to always be rendered horizontally. If there does exist such a UI control somewhere, then we should follow what that does.

Comment 11

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Sound like adding a navigation for vertical writing mode would be an improvement but fairly low priority. 
I think this can drop off the platform triage list.

Comment 12

[Hsin-Yi Tsai (she/her) [:hsinyi]]

[Triage] Coming back this issue several months later, it's still thought a very low priority issue as comment 7 suggested. Setting P5. Feel free to change as you see fit.

Comment 13

[Sergey Galich [:serg]]

We'd need fresh steps to reproduce to make this actionable.