Comment 21 for bug 181575

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

The new substring-search pop-down box attached to the URL bar in Firefox-3.0 is generally very nice, but I have one annoyance with it regarding keyboard navigation. I tend not to use the mouse a great deal, and am in the habit of pressing Ctrl-t Ctrl-l <type URL> to open a new tab, unless I'm copying and pasting the URL.

Here's a reduced test case. Open a new tab in Firefox-3.0 (current version in Hardy: 3.0~b3~cvs20080101t1000+nobinonly-0ubuntu1). Ensure that the mouse is positioned a little below the URL bar, in the area that will be covered by the substring-search pop-down box. Type a single character, so that the substring-search pop-down box appears. Note that whatever the mouse happens to be hovering over is selected. Press Enter. The hovered-over entry is selected.

As described, I suppose this is not so annoying, but the way I encounter this in practice is that I try to enter "http://www.example.com/", but because my mouse is hovering over the position in the pop-down box where "http://www.example.com/something/else" is placed, pressing Enter selects that instead, when what I actually wanted (and what I contend is expected behaviour) was to get to the URL I typed in.

IMHO, pressing Enter should only select an entry from substring-search if you navigated to that entry using the cursor keys. Otherwise, it should require a mouse click to select it. The current way that mouse positioning and keyboard navigation interact is confusing.