Hotkeys? Yes, please!

[fxpm-nicole]

Hello Connect Community!
This is Nicole from the Fx Essentials Product Management Team. I am in the process of exploring some potential changes around hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts, as this is something that is being asked for quite a bit in the Connect Community.

I have a few questions I'd like to put out there for everyone.
1. What are your top five most used hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts?
2. What shortcuts do you wish Firefox offered?
3. Is there a non-Firefox browser you prefer because of how they 'do' hotkeys/shortcuts?

As always, thank you in advance for contributing to this discussion! Looking forward to hearing all of your answers!

Thanks!
Nicole

[haingdc]

So do I. It would be great if we can see some mock-up

[ZacW]

A status update for this feature would be incredible. Are we waiting another 2 years, or 2 months?

[tifan]

would be great to inform us of the update please

[bdodroid]

Honestly I just want to get rid of ctrl+shift+p (or change it to ctrl + shift + n)
It breaks the shortcut to the Command Pallet in github codespaces (where I do 80% of my work) and it was just maddening enough to drive me back to chrome as my daily driver.

[ThePillenwerfer]

I don't know if you're still interested but the main ones I use are Ctrl-Shift-p and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-i.  If I did want to save or print a web-page, which I very rarely do, I'd certainly press ^S or ^P rather than mess about with the menus.  I may make more use of them in general if I knew what they were.  A link on the Help menu would be handy.

[Jon]

Hey all, YES we're still listening and interested in hearing your feedback / ideas for all things hotkeys here. Keep it coming! We'll plan to close out this discussion in the next week or so and of course share any plans when they're available.

[shodan]

Hi Jon,

This discussion has 87 replies to it.

What you need to do is not to close it out.

What you need to do is , you and your team, to responds to things.

Not "make a statement" but actually engage in what has so far been a mostly a one sided discussion.

What firefox needs to have is a Valve's "Steam Input"-like system that allows any sort of input device (keyboard, mouse, joystick) to be able to be bound to absolutely ANY browser internal function, or java scriptlet/bookmarklets

Don't even try to constrain and map what input event can and can't to which internal function.

A game keybinding inspired interface  attached to any and all existing internal function (with intellisense/code completion -like search)

Don't try to anticipate what function we'll need or what device we're using, leave all of that to the user and just let us bind anything to anything else. The users will figure it out.

And don't end this discussion, retreat to the ivory tower and then come back with a finished product.

Because if you do that, you will forget really obvious things, like "allowing to bind more than two keys to the same action", which happens all the time in games.

If you don't want to be doing this all over again in 5 years, you need to let the users steer development early and often. (This holds for many other aspect of FIrefox (and all software))

[ThePillenwerfer]

Further to the above I've just looked at a list of shortcuts and was surprised to see "Delete Selected Autocomplete Entry ==>  Shift-Delete" as I've been pressing that out of habit with no result and had concluded it was a function Firefox didn't have.  Maybe it's a Linux thing.

[d9a]

I just created an account to echo a few others here: the lack of customizable keyboard shortcuts is the single biggest thing preventing me from switching back to Firefox, and that's been the case since the day support was dropped however many years ago. Some of the potential changes being discussed in this thread could finally make it possible for me to come back and cut a whole lot of Chromium out of my life, so I'm thrilled to see this getting some much-needed attention.

In the meantime, I've been using Vivaldi, which I would also call the gold standard (at least in terms of flexibility -- their actual implementation is iffy at best, and even default shortcuts fail to be recognized in a variety of circumstances due to their entire UI being a React app). While there's plenty of room for differentiation, here's a simple yet specific example: if Firefox introduced a keyboard customization page that was a blatantly ripped off clone of Vivaldi's, I'd be dusting off some decade-old songbooks and singing Mozilla's praises from the rooftops.

I've also recently been trying Floorp, and while it's a marked improvement over Firefox in several ways, the keyboard shortcut customization is still pretty limited compared to what's possible in Vivaldi, and leaves me without access to some things I'd really like to be able to do with just a keyboard. It's also a shame that Floorp doesn't display any existing shortcuts, and only lets you disable all default ones with a single checkbox rather than modifying/removing individual ones as desired.

Off the top of my head, these are the keyboard shortcuts I have the most trouble with in Firefox:

• Duplicate the current tab
• Pop out the current tab to a new window (without reloading)
• Jump directly to a tab with Ctrl+# -- this works on Windows, but for some reason got moved to Alt on Linux, which conflicts with unrelated system-wide shortcuts for me
• Open common internal pages (settings, addons, etc)
  Plus a few more that currently work, but are admittedly less common so I'd like to emphasize their importance to me:
• Place my cursor directly in the address bar
• Reopen the last-closed tab
• Reload the page both with and without using cache
• Open the browser's process manager, preferably in a popup window rather than a tab
• Open/close Dev Tools, including shortcuts to directly open a certain tab (inspector, console, etc) -- almost fine, but Ctrl+Shift+J opens a console-only popup for the browser itself, rather than full dev tools for the current page

Some of these already have shortcuts, but ones that don't make sense to me and are hard to remember. Some are possible with addons, but typically a separate one for each desired behavior, leaving me with a big mess of addons installed each doing one tiny thing. While I deeply appreciate the flexibility offered by addons to extend my browser as I see fit and don't want my browser to be a whole kitchen sink of built-in features I'll never use (looking at you, Vivaldi), I really think custom keyboard shortcuts are a core fundamental feature of a browser, and anything that doesn't support them is doomed to be little more than a toy.

Finally, all of those shortcuts need to be possible to change or remove, if only to be consistent with the rest of my system, whatever that means for me. No single set of defaults will ever be right for everyone, and customization is key to making a browser feel like it's "mine." A great example is opening a private browsing window, which in every other browser I can think of uses Ctrl+Shift+N, while Firefox expects me to swap the N for a P. In addition to my personal belief that N makes more sense (open a new window with Ctrl+N, or add a modifier to make it a different type of window) it's unfortunately also unlikely to be practical to fully stop using a Chromium-based browser for the foreseeable future (it being "the new IE" and all that). If I'm going to be running multiple browsers side-by-side and don't want to hate my life, I need to be able to make them behave consistently. Additionally, if there's a shortcut I don't use, disabling it in the browser frees it up to be used for something entirely different, and reduces the chance of surprises if I fat-finger something (like Ctrl+Q, sandwiched between the extremely common Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+W, and Ctrl+A, instantly closing all browser windows without confirmation, as Chrome used to do by default).

A little off-topic, but closely related in my mind: Vivaldi also allows users to customize all its various context and dropdown menus, which is also extremely useful when I'm using a mouse. About half of Firefox's assorted menu entries are things I can confidently say I'd never, ever want to select, so being able to remove/reorder things lets me have a perfect balance of minimalism and power-user functionality that's impossible to deliver out of the box. Being able to move things out of submenus like "More tools" would be especially useful, since I really hate Firefox's new non-cascading mobile-style main menu that slowly animates between "pages" that replace the level above them, and want me to move my mouse over to a small "back" button to move back up, making it quicker to just close the menu and re-open it. Customizing menus would obviously be a completely separate project if it ever gets picked up at all, but it's the one other big "killer feature" I think Vivaldi has over Firefox.

[Jon]

Thanks! This is really good feedback and supports what a lot of others are asking for: the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts, including being able to change or remove them. 

And for context menus, there's a similar idea thread here on Connect:

Ability to edit context menus, remove unnecessary options 

Feel free to check it out, vote, and add any additional insights 💪

[haingdc]

Thanks for listening to us. Hopefully, Firefox will have improved in shortcut management. Btw, I see that add-on shortcuts are here but it's hard to spot the page

[jan2]

Mark multiple tabs keyboard shortcut key.

the new mark and close multiple tabs is great and one i've wanted for a long time. pressing ctrl+w is tedious. Good job. im a keyboard user and with the ctrl+w should come a keyboard shortcut for marking the tabs I want to close. 

i constantly open multiple search hits to choose which gives the closest answer to my search and often just leave the discarded tabs open and just clean-up periodically. i move the interesting ones to the left with alt+tab and ctrl+shift+pgup pgdn keys. then i move all the way right and start ctrl+w repeatedly.

This is tedious, but works for now.

With your excellent team finding this small shortcut will be a breeze.

But the ovations will be enormous 🙂

good luck and keep up the good work,

[alefith]

probably would be a good idea for a ff function/extension: a result aggregator for a single query across multiple search engine. with said engines customizable.
Should we open a new issue/suggestion for this?

Ps: it'd be awesome to have a quick way to compare the search result of, say wikipedia and google scholar; or amazon, etsy, google shopping, and whatever online store; or even better: a customizable search of NYT, daily telegraph, and whatever newspapers...
It would be an awesome tool against fake news too.

Tell me what we should do with this idea, I mioght have to learn how to code mozilla extensions^^

[P1h3r1e3d13]

1. What are your top five [“five”] most used hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts?

Actual top five (hotkey GOATs):

• Ctrl+T
• Ctrl+W
• Ctrl[+Shift]+Tab (counts as one!)
• Ctrl+F
• F5 (I actually pressed it here instead of F & 5 🤦)

Daily at least:

• Ctrl[+Shift]+T, Ctrl+W (tab open & close)
• Ctrl[+Shift]+Tab (tab cycle)
• Ctrl+1 & Ctrl+9 (first & last tabs)
• Ctrl[+Shift]+R & Ctrl+F5 (reload)
• Ctrl+F, /, ', F3, & Esc (search in page)
• Home, End, Ctrl+↑, Ctrl+↓ (page top & bottom)
• Ctrl+. (1Password)
• Ctrl+Enter (.com completion)
• Backspace (I've mostly trained myself out of this one)
• Tab (navigate forms, occasionally links)
• Almost everything under “Editing”
• Ctrl+S (save—mostly on PDFs & images)
• Ctrl+0 & Ctrl+mousewheel-up (zoom reset, zoom in)
• Ctrl+Shift+A (add-ons)
• ^, *, % (address bar suggestions, if you're counting that)
• smart keywords, if you're counting that

And somewhat less frequently:

• Ctrl[+Shift]+B, Ctrl+D (bookmarks)
• Ctrl+Shift+P (new private window)
• F12 (developer tools)
• Ctrl+U (view source)
• Ctrl+J (downloads)
• Ctrl+Shift+S (screenshot—trying to learn this one so I can hide the button)
• Space (go down a screen)
• Ctrl++ (i.e. Ctrl+Shift+=) (zoom in)
• F11 (full screen)
• Esc (cancel drag-and-drop)
• Space, ←, → (media)
• Ctrl+Q (update bookmark)

2. What shortcuts do you wish Firefox offered?

• Ctrl+, (settings—why does only Mac get this?!)
• Ctrl+` (Firefox View)
• open sidebar (most recently used, like the sidebar button does)
• open each sidebar feature: synced tabs, chatbot
• [smash face on keyboard] (make page conform to web standards)
• general shortcut customization, as others have said

3. Is there a non-Firefox browser you prefer because of how they 'do' hotkeys/shortcuts?

Never!
I like some of the options in some other browsers, but nothing is broken/missing enough in Firefox to override the rest of the benefits.

---

Thank you @fxpm-nicole for working on this, and for doing it in a user-first way! 🍻

[P1h3r1e3d13]

(Maybe this is easier to read.)

1. What are your top five [“five”] most used hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts?

Actual top five (hotkey GOATs):

Ctrl+T
Ctrl+W
Ctrl[+Shift]+Tab  (counts as one!)
Ctrl+F
F5                (I actually pressed it here instead of F & 5 🤦)

Daily at least:

Ctrl[+Shift]+T, Ctrl+W   tab open & close
Ctrl[+Shift]+Tab         tab cycle
Ctrl+1 & Ctrl+9          first & last tabs
Ctrl[+Shift]+R, Ctrl+F5  reload
Ctrl+F, /, ', F3, Esc    search in page
Home, End, Ctrl+↑/↓      page top & bottom
Ctrl+.                   1Password
Ctrl+Enter               .com completion
Backspace                back—I've mostly trained myself out of this one
Tab                      navigate forms, occasionally links
[duh]                    almost everything under “Editing”
Ctrl+S                   save—mostly on PDFs & images
Ctrl+0 & Ctrl+wheel-up   zoom reset, zoom in
Ctrl+Shift+A             add-ons
^, *, %                  address bar suggestions, if you're counting that
[user-defined]           smart keywords, if you're counting that

And somewhat less frequently:

Ctrl[+Shift]+B, Ctrl+D  bookmarks
Ctrl+Shift+P            new private window
F12                     developer tools
Ctrl+U                  view source
Ctrl+J                  downloads
Ctrl+Shift+S            screenshot—trying to learn this one so I can hide the button
Space                   go down a screen
Ctrl++ (i.e. Ctrl+Shift+=)  zoom in
F11                     full screen
Esc                     cancel drag-and-drop
Space, ←, →             media
Ctrl+Q                  update bookmark

2. What shortcuts do you wish Firefox offered?

Ctrl+,                    settings—why does only Mac get this?!
Ctrl+`                    Firefox View
open sidebar              most recently used, like the sidebar button does
open each sidebar feature: synced tabs, chatbot
[smash face on keyboard]  make page conform to web standards
general shortcut customization, as others have said

3. Is there a non-Firefox browser you prefer because of how they 'do' hotkeys/shortcuts?

Never!
I like some of the options in some other browsers, but nothing is broken/missing enough in Firefox to override the rest of the benefits.

---

Thank you @fxpm-nicole for working on this, and for doing it in a user-first way! 🍻

[haingdc]

And Don't forget counting Addon shortcuts in 🙂

[vincentj]

What are your top five most used hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts?

#1 is Ctrl+F for Find (along with F3/Shift+F3 to Find Next/Previous), but this is sadly getting less useful lately.
Some sites override the Ctrl+F shortcut which I absolutely hate... I know I can press Ctrl+F twice to open Find, but I would prefer if I could just prevent all sites from overriding this shortcut in the first place.

The other reason it's getting less useful is because some sites now implement virtual scrolling, so not all items are added to the DOM.  This destroys the built-in browser Find feature which makes me cranky.  If sites want to implement virtual scrolling, then I wish I could make my browser have a virtual super-tall window to force Find to work again... performance be damned.

Breaking built-in browser search is a terrible web design trend that should be shamed and abolished.

Other frequently used shortcuts in no particular order:

Ctrl+Shift+P to open a private window
Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen a closed tab
Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn to switch tabs
PgUp/PgDown to scroll
Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End to go to the top/bottom of a page
Ctrl+Mousewheel up/down to zoom, and Ctrl+0 to reset zoom
F12 to open dev tools
Alt+Left/Alt+Right to navigate backward/forward

What shortcuts do you wish Firefox offered?

Waaay back in the day, you used to be able to press Esc after the page loaded to stop all web requests, animations (animated GIFs or Javascript animations), sounds, etc.  Basically, you could press Esc to make the page Stop Doing Stuff.  That doesn't work anymore so I have an extension called SuperStop which does this with Shift+Esc.  But then, Firefox bound Shift+Esc to open the process manager, which broke the extension.

So, I would love if Firefox would re-implement that ancient browser feature where a simple press of Esc would actually stop ALL animation/sound/web traffic/javascript activity on the page.  Would be very useful when I want to keep a page open for reference but want to disable all the distracting video, animation, and battery-sucking javascript nonsense.

[irrationality]

Love the write-up and mention of Escape! I tried this recently and was disappointed it didn’t work like I remembered. I also use the page zoom features and some of your other shortcuts. 

[24jheyman]

Many things that I can click with the mouse to bring me to another page allow me to hold Shift to open that page in a new window, or hold Ctrl to open it in a new tab. This includes links on a page, items in the suggestion panel and the navigation buttons. However, actuating these features with Enter or their keyboard shortcuts doesn't always allow this. For example, I can't press Ctrl-Alt-Left to open the previous page in a new tab, but can click the back button while holding Ctrl, or I can't use holding Ctrl when selecting items in the location bar suggestions with arrow keys and (Ctrl-)Enter, but can by clicking them. (I did just learn that Tab and then Enter on the page support this, but not on the other UI parts).

I think supporting this meaning of shift and control everywhere possible would be Intuitive, as I sometimes expect it to exist where it doesn't, because of the parts where it already does. Many keyboard inputs such as Ctrl-Enter in the suggestions, or Ctrl-F5, or Ctrl-Alt-Left also don't have any existing meanings, so they wouldn't break anything in these cases.

Some cases, like Ctrl-N for new window and Ctrl-T for new tab already break this expectation, but because of text input, Shift-T for new window wouldn't work, and furthermore both this and something crazy like Alt-Shift-T which would work would violate the expectations of other firefox users who know where these Shortcuts used to be. That's why I think of this as a future use case for completely customizable keyboard shortcuts, which others have already suggested. Finally I don't know if all of these can be introduced in the meantime by Extensions, as Ctrl-F5 has F5 take precedence somehow, and I can't imagine an extension changing what happens when I press Ctrl-Enter on a search suggestion. That's another reason why I think this would be well placed inside firefox.

[d9a]

---

Many keyboard inputs such as [...] Ctrl-F5 [...] also don't have any existing meanings, so they wouldn't break anything in these cases.

Quick note about this one example: Ctrl+F5 does have an existing meaning in Firefox, which is a "hard refresh" AKA reloading the page without using any cached data. Shift+F5 also does the same in many other browsers, but in Firefox it opens the DevTools panel to the Performance tab (one of many unexpected defaults I'd love to be able to "fix" on my own machines)

[kcrht]

2. A keyboard shortcut to open the context menu for selecting a container for a new tab would be immensely helpful.

[nobelphoenix]

I really don't understand the radio silence around this [custom hotkey binding] topic. It feels like a feature some intern could do over a weekend.

It's a widely accepted and used feature in lots of browsers. [which shows that it's probably not that hard to implement; not a novel code, algorithm, or method]

It's a feature that's in high demand.

Users have been requesting this feature since years, perhaps almost for a decade.*

Now, I want to justify your reluctance by thinking you probably want to overhaul tons of stuff and want to include this feature among many other shiny new things, or perhaps the backend stuff is SO messy you just can't even integrate this simple thing without broking the entirety of the code.

But either case at least the common courtesy would've been to provide a feedback so that we could manage our expectations. To be honest after this thread, I don't even believe this feature will ever be a thing. Probably mozilla will shut down before this feature ever will be a thing.

* If anyone one Mozilla's side considers this point as "well things are going fine for mozilla even without that feature for decades so we should be fine", there are tons of other browsers with equal or sometimes better features [and no, this doesn't mean you should proritize integrating unnecessary AI assistant stuff over this feature just because it's hype right now] and I really do want to support Mozilla and Firefox but if you can't even provide this simple feature I'll keep using chromium based browsers and talk down about Firefox. I'm pretty sure there's a significant amount of users who thinks the same.

[d9a]

---

Users have been requesting this feature since years, perhaps almost for a decade.*

The timeframe is even simpler: users have been requesting this feature since it was removed, starting with Firefox 57

[suikaz]

and same goes for mouse gestures that actually work, WebExtensions just can't do that

[wybqogzigoxruxd]

I hope I am not too late. I would like to have ability to redefine every hotkey they way I like. And I would like to have None as a option also. Like in Games where I usually have separate config page for all the keys, and I have columns like key and alternative key and option to unassign. Like sometimes I keep hitting some key by accident but I never use this feature - so I would be happy if I can unassign. And sometimes I want to define alternative keys - for example bind multiple nearby keys for the same action so that if I keep my eyes on monitor and blindly hit key I would not have to be accurate because because I have several keys in that some keyboard region defined for the same action. With games for example I redefine W, A, S, D to arrow keys because I am oldschool gamer who has not got used to modern layout. I would like to have that kind of total freedom with firefox also.

[papadoi1]

The shortcuts are supposed to make life easier for users. 

Here is my suggestion. It's called "Auto Activity Matrix" or some other catchy name. Basically the browser records your in-browser application engagement and it suggests shortcuts and layout for you. Once you have a large number of user information layouts and engagement, you can make positive suggestions are recommendations to users about their engagement with it. It can be in the form of AI assistance.

Thanks Nicole for all your amazing work.

Ioannis Papadopoulos