Firefox single hotkey shortcut - undermines Website Coding
I have no idea why, developers who do coding, would create in Firefox the single key " / " (forward slash) as a single hotkey to activate "Quickfind".
The forward slash is one of the characters used to create a Comment in CSS and PHP. Plus, even on the basic use level, forward slash is used to create division between words like so... this/is/dividing/words.
So here is a very important feedback to this useless feature -- Remove IT!!!
Either remove it completely or create toggle buttons for it, or assign and keyboard shortcut that does NOT belong to normal use or coding use or GIVE US THE ABILITY TO CHANGE IT - DAM IT.
I am sadly finding the concept of "usability" seems to be a hard concept for developers in software, web applications and even web design.
All Replies (4)
Note, I already disabled the QuickFind key via "about:config". I use CTRL+F to find anything on the page.
This is an ancient shortcut which I suspect is unlikely to be changed. Firefox may evolve a general purpose keyboard shortcut changer/disabler, but so far, there's only one for extension shortcuts and not built-in ones.
That said, if you are typing in an <input>, <textarea>, or contenteditable element, the / should not trigger QuickFind / FindAsYouType. Is there a particular site where you see this problem? Maybe it is an edge case that needs to be excluded.
As a workaround, you can use a key reassignment extension to disable / from doing anything outside of an editing field. That may or may not work with the site that triggered your post.
Example: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/shortkeys/
If you run user scripts, I have an old one here along the same lines: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/13484-prevent-slash-opening-quickfind
If you are in an editor textarea or in an input field then the two hotkeys to do a search should work normally and not start a quick find. When this is a content editable text input area then things might be different.
What are you trying to do when this happens?
Never had the issue before when using FireFox and this issue recently occurred. I have no idea what triggered this issue recently. This was in regards to the same website I was working on.
I was using Beaver Page builder on a website (front-end editor). Before today, I was able to use " / " in a Custom CSS module in the page builder on the webpage. Then suddenly, today, I could not use " / " because it kept triggering QuickFind.
I tried a couple of keyboard key reassignment extensions, they could not change the QuickFind key assignment. In the end of it, I simply disabled QuickFind in about:config, since I don't really use it anyway. I use CTRL+F to search a page.
Still, I think it was dumb to assign a commonly used keyboard character " / " to trigger a browser function. It would have been smarter to assign a key combination, like "Alt+/" instead.
I would reassign the QuickFind function to a keyboard key combo if I had the asscess to do so, but FireFox developers in their wisdom blocked that kind of access.