D. M. Reporter
	Description • 9 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20150403142420

Steps to reproduce:

For any reason - intentional or not - change the focus to something other than the content. For instance CLTR-L to get to the URL field, or CTRL-K to get to the search field. Or menus, or other focus states that may exist. This can happen by intention or inadvertently or through various Firefox or OS events, stealing focus in various ways.



Actual results:

I am now unable to consistently get focus back to the content, without either:

1) Clicking with the mouse somewhere in the content, risiking actions or navigations to start taking place, changing the state I want to work on.

2) Clicking on TAB several times, depending on where my focus had ended up. The nubmer of times necessary, is hard to predict or remember. For inadvertent focus losses, it can be impossible - so I have to follow the visual cues.


Expected results:

There should have been one single hotkey to focus on the content. For example CTRL-J. If this had existed, whenever I lost content (usually something I discover when I can no longer press SPACE to scroll down in the content), I would be able to issue a CTRL-J and confidently be able to navigate inside the content again.

The problem with the alternate ways of focusing is that the results are not predictable, so you have to wait for the results until you can begin navigating. With a dedicated hotkey, I would be able to issue fast navigation commands from the keyboard without waiting to see what was going in.

	Gingerbread Man
	Comment 1 • 9 years ago

F6
* Focuses the location bar, when the content area has focus.
* Focuses the content area, when the focus is on either the location bar or the search bar.
* Cycles forward through frames on a page, in multi-frame documents.

Does this suit your needs, or do you need a keyboard shortcut to always focus the content area?

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly

	D. M. Reporter
	Comment 2 • 9 years ago

It's close enough for me, I guess the issue is closeable. 

But IMO a dedicated key to always focus on the content would make sense in the context of CTRL-L and CTRL-K, and be more predictable for power users who want to start using keyboard navigation without visually assessing where the focus is first (necessary to reliably use F6) - especially when there is no real visual feedback that the focus is on the content area. The real problem is that this causes me to look for places on a page I can click without invoking an action, and which is frustrating in normal situations but extremely frustrating when it turns out the click causes the page to change.