User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6 When I pres tab in the URL field it usually moves focus to the search box. However if auto complete is visible, tab cycles through the items in autocomplete and then back to the url field. The only way to move focus to the search box or the web page is to cancel autocomplete. This is bad -- if a user clicks in the url bar and starts typing something, then realizes they meant to type it into the search box they will press tab. However, autocomplete likely took over and is now stealing the tabs. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start typing something in the url field until autocomplete shows up 2. press tab Actual Results: focus moved to the first item in the autocomplete list Expected Results: focus should have moved to the search field

This is probably going to get WONTFIXed, or just sit here forever. Removing this functionality would be pretty stupid and non-user-friendly. The times when a user needs to tab down to an autocomplete entry are far more common than the times they need to tab to the search bar. This is what Ctrl+K can be used for. This also wouldn't offer any benefit if someone was hiding the search bar.

Also see bug 86643.

Someone wanting to "tab through" the autocomplete results can use the arrow keys. Why should the behavior of the tab key be changed? If someone is hiding the search bar then the behavior of the tab key should be to switch focus to the web page. I'm not saying that having tab switch focus to autocomplete is such a bad idea. But pressing it again should go to the next ui element (ie the search field or the web page), not cycle between the url field and the items in the autocomplete list. Using tab to cycle through the elements of a list is completely inconsistent with it's usage in other parts of firefox.

You have a point, possibly a controversial one, and definitely something that it's too late in the cycle to fix for 1.5 To be honest we're definitely open to ideas from the community on stuff, but your email name is offensive to me. Don't start the discussion off in such a confrontational way and expect any results. You're just annoying people who work hard.

Sorry. That was rather stupid. I didn't mean to offend, I was merely frustrated after repeatedly being bitten by this and several other UI problems.

Is this a dupe of bug 171495, or is that requesting that we tab into the searchbox after we reach the last autocomplete entry?

No, this is not a dupe of bug 171495, which was about having items in the autocomplete box that executed web searches. This bug is simply about the fact that the autocomplete box steals tabs, preventing you from reaching the (separate) web search box until you cancel autocomplete. I'm not saying we should necessarily do anything about it, but this is definitely a separate issue.

Similarly when I key in a URL and double click on the URL that comes up from the history (presumably), the browser re-directs to another url i.e. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs302/io/Exceptions.html. I'm not sure why this happens.

Related: Bug 1293147