Let's talk about the "Copy Link" access key

[Guest]

Right now it's "L." This means that you can right-click a link and press "L" on the keyboard to copy that link's address. But why bother moving your hand over to the "L" key when you could just click "Copy Link?" Indeed, it's not much easier.

However, the access key for copying the link address used to be "A," which would have been right under your hand already. This was back when the label was "Copy Link Location." It was a really convenient way to do it. It was the most common thing I did when right clicking a link, and the most common way I copied a link address. I even had telemetry enabled.

Of course, now this menu item is called "Copy Link," and there's no "A" in "Copy Link." Last time this was discussed, Mozilla said they still believed making this change was the right thing to do (guess how I copied that link, by the way) and that a place other than a discussion forum was the wrong place to try to discuss it. It's 2022, and Mozilla Connect is here, so let's finally talk about this.

Let me start us off with some things various people had from before:

• "A" is nicer
• It's possible, but awkward, to put an extra letter in the label to be able to set it to that
• It would be more engineering work to let users customize everything
• Some users, allegedly the majority, don't even use access keys

One thing that I think never got a fair chance to be heard is why, in the first place, was "Copy Link" so preferred over "Copy Link Location" or any other compromise. For the people here, how are you liking the new label? Is it better than before?

[jscher2000]

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@Guest wrote:

One thing that I think never got a fair chance to be heard is why, in the first place, was "Copy Link" so preferred over "Copy Link Location" or any other compromise. For the people here, how are you liking the new label? Is it better than before?

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I think the word "location" was considered difficult to understand. Removing location from that menu item had a similar purpose to renaming the location bar to the address bar.

That said, it is technically possible to assign accelerator keys that are not included in the words and Firefox will display them in parentheses (as in the case of Q for Inspect -- formerly called Inspect Element). So it's not necessary to bring back the word location to bring back A as the accelerator key.

(I realize this is a suggestion, and not a support request, but if you haven't found a workaround for the time being, I'll mention the option of a startup script which is documented on my page over here: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-js.html.)

[Guest]

> I think the word "location" was considered difficult to understand.

Oh! This brings back some other things I remember about previous discussions. The arguments in favor of the changes came across as kind of vague. "Was considered" in your summary is apt. There's never been any finger pointing at who considered it so. And to be sure, I think that's the right way to handle this. But the downside of this is that we don't know if this was a data driven decision or anything. We never even got to feel happy for the groups who like this change. All we're left with is the feeling that the browser is drifting towards valuing some unjustified cosmetic change over being easier to use.

Nice workaround, by the way. Really reminds me of the era of "bootstrapped" extensions!

[jscher2000]

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@Guest wrote:

"Was considered" in your summary is apt. There's never been any finger pointing at who considered it so.

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The menu trimming in Proton was pretty ruthless. I assume that a number of people seeking to simplify it went over it as a combined effort and there wouldn't be a lot of documentation for each individual change.